Expertise
Security and Compliance
Pre-audit readiness, operational resilience, evidence packaging, and post-finding remediation for regulated financial institutions. From DORA programmes to PCI DSS v4.0 preparation and supervisory response — focused on the work that gets you ready for the assessment, and ready for what comes after it.
Most security and compliance work in banks is not done by the auditor or by the QSA — it is done by the team getting ready for them, and the team responding to what they find. We focus on that work. Pre-audit gap analysis and readiness. Operational resilience programmes. Evidence packaging that holds up under scrutiny. Closure of supervisory findings on the regulator's timeline. Our engagements run from the months before an assessment through to the closeout of post-audit remediation programmes — including the architectural and operational changes needed to keep the next review from finding the same issues.
What we deliver
Pre-audit readiness and gap analysis
Programme-level preparation for upcoming audits, supervisory reviews, and certifications. Gap analysis against the relevant framework (PCI DSS v4.0, ISO 27001, DORA, internal audit standards), control mapping to existing implementation, identification of evidence gaps, and a prioritised remediation plan. The goal is to walk into the assessment knowing where the issues are and having addressed them — not to find out from the auditor.
DORA and operational resilience programmes
Readiness, scoping, and planning work for DORA programmes — gap analysis against the regulation and the Regulatory Technical Standards, mapping requirements to existing control environments, third-party risk register design, major-incident reporting workflow design, and operational resilience scenario planning. We focus on the readiness and planning work that determines whether the eventual delivery programme runs cleanly. Also covers UK FCA operational resilience expectations, important business service mapping, and impact tolerance setting where these intersect with DORA.
PCI DSS readiness and remediation
Preparation for PCI DSS v4.0 QSA assessment — scope analysis and reduction, control design and implementation, evidence collection, and the operational discipline needed to support continuous validation under v4.0. We work alongside your chosen QSA, not as one, focusing on the implementation and remediation work that surrounds the assessment itself. Includes response to QSA findings and remediation of identified gaps.
Evidence packaging and audit documentation
The work that determines whether an assessor or supervisor accepts your control claims first time. Structured evidence repositories, control mapping documentation, audit trail design across systems, and the supporting narrative that ties technical evidence to the regulator's actual concern. Auditors look for specific things in specific formats; we know what they are and how to package them.
Post-audit and supervisory findings remediation
Programme delivery to close findings from supervisory reviews, internal audits, QSA assessments, or regulator-led examinations. Includes findings triage and prioritisation, remediation roadmap, programme governance with regulator-facing milestones, and the closeout evidence package that satisfies the verification step. Suitable for institutions managing post-Section 166 remediation, ECB / PRA review responses, or large internal audit programmes.
Regulatory compliance programmes (GDPR, AML, PSD2)
Programme delivery across the broader regulatory perimeter — GDPR (data protection by design, breach reporting, right-to-erasure plumbing), AML / KYC (process and control implementation, transaction monitoring tuning, regulator filing readiness), PSD2 / PSD3 (Strong Customer Authentication implementation, open banking compliance). Production-grade delivery with the evidence packaging built in, not policy documents stored on SharePoint.
Why banks work with us on security and compliance
Pre-audit and post-audit specialists, not auditors
We do not assess, we do not certify, and we do not run threat-led penetration tests. We help you prepare for the firms and supervisors that do — and we help you respond when they find issues. That focus matters: it means we are not constrained by independence requirements, we can do the implementation work auditors are not allowed to do, and we are not commercially incentivised to find issues for the sake of finding them.
Engineering and regulatory in the same engagement
Most pre-audit and remediation work fails at the seam between the people who understand the regulation and the people who can implement the fix in code, infrastructure, or process. Our engagements span both — programme leads who can read a supervisory letter, alongside engineers who can change a Terraform module or reconfigure a control. The handover between policy and reality happens inside the team.
Built for the supervisory environment, not generic frameworks
ISO 27001 and NIST CSF are useful starting points, but supervisors do not assess against them — they assess against their own expectations. Our readiness work targets supervisory expectations directly, with framework mapping as a by-product. The result is documentation and evidence that holds up in a supervisory review, not just an ISO surveillance audit.
Compliance as a property of how you operate
Producing compliance evidence as a project deliverable is twice the work for half the value. Where the engagement scope allows, we embed compliance instrumentation into the operational architecture itself — audit logs structured for regulator queries from day one, control tests that run continuously, evidence packs that build themselves out of operational telemetry. The compliance posture is a property of how the system runs, not a binder produced once a year.
Production-grade, not proof-of-concept
We measure success in clean supervisory reviews, audit findings closed on schedule, certifications achieved on planned timelines, and remediation programmes signed off by the assessor or regulator. Engagements include the closeout evidence pack and the handover to operational ownership — not a closure deck.
Deep familiarity with the DORA framework
We have followed DORA closely since publication — the Level 1 text, the Regulatory Technical Standards as they arrived through 2024, and the supervisory Q&A and clarifications since. For firms at the readiness, scoping, or gap-analysis stage of a DORA programme, we bring the regulatory grounding to the planning work and apply our broader programme delivery experience to the execution path.
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