Software requirements for digital operational resilience in financial services

Key takeaways

Regulators have changed the question they ask financial firms. It's no longer enough to prevent a cyberattack or an outage — banks, credit unions, and other financial firms now have to prove they can keep critical services running during one. DORA, the UK's operational resilience rules, and Canada's OSFI guidance have turned digital operational resilience into a documented, testable obligation. Meeting it takes more than backup servers. You need software that can capture an incident the moment it happens, control every change, brief staff under pressure, track third-party risk, and produce audit evidence on demand — all on one trail a regulator will accept.

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For years, the question from your regulator was simple: could you stop a cyberattack?

Now it's harder. Can you keep paying members and processing transactions while one is underway, and can you prove it once it's over?

It's a fair question. Over the past two decades, the financial sector has suffered more than 20,000 cyberattacks and $12 billion in losses — and the IMF expects this to get worse.

This shift has been written into law across various jurisdictions with DORA, FCA PS21/3, PRA SS1/21, and the OSFI now in place in the EU, UK and Canada respectively.

Across each region, regulators expect financial firms to identify their vital services, prove they can keep them running through disruption, report incidents quickly, and provide a complete record of said incident when required.

This is hard at the best of times. But when you’re reacting to a business-level threat? It’s far worse.

This is where a comprehensive, compliant digital workplace for financial services, like Claromentis, can help.

Today, I’m going to be talking about the software capabilities that will boost your operational resilience, show where teams usually fall short, and explain how you can consolidate all your compliance operations into a single platform.

The resilience gaps hiding in regional finance

In 2024, a Luxembourg regulator surveyed 389 entities on their DORA readiness months before the deadline. Only one firm said it was ready.

This is because too many regional banks and credit unions walk into a resilience review with two disadvantages: leaner teams and older systems.

They’re not failing, but these weaknesses make resilience gaps more likely. And, ultimately, regulators don’t care if you’re understaffed or reliant on legacy systems; iIf you’re missing the mark, you will be found non-compliant.

This is a widespread issue in the financial services industry.

The two most common gaps in financial compliance are:

• Relying on manual incident logs or email chains
• Scattered data across a myriad of legacy systems

Let’s talk about each in turn.

Relying on manual incident logs or email chains

When a service goes down or a supplier reports a breach, many teams respond through manual incident logs and email chains.

One of your colleagues spots it and emails their colleagues. A message thread grows while the clock ticks on. But no one is sure who owns the incident, no one has a live status, and there is no timeline that you can trust afterwards.

According to the new DORA rules, this is nowhere near fast enough.

DORA expects an initial notification to your regulator within hours of an incident being classified as major. An email chain can't hit that window and it can't reconstruct who did what, and when, once the dust settles.

Scattered data across a myriad of legacy systems

Your policies, risk assessments, supplier contracts, change records, and training logs live across legacy systems, shared drives, and inboxes.

Sound familiar? Hopefully not.

This means there’s no single source of truth to put in front of a regulator during a stress test. Assembling proof becomes a manual scramble across half a dozen tools, and anything you can't find quickly indicates that you don’t have control over your system.

5 essential capabilities for digital operational resilience

Both of these gaps have a compounding effect on your resilience and response times.

A slow, undocumented response is bad on its own. But, pair it with fragmented evidence and you get an institution that can't show compliance or evidence when things go bad. Even when that proof exists in reality.

The fix isn't another point tool bolted onto the stack. It's a set of connected capabilities that cover the whole lifecycle.

Use these five capabilities to map your ability to comply with financial regulations - from DORA’s pillars of incident reporting and third-party risk to the UK’s focus on staying within impact tolerances.

1. Capture and resolve every incident in one place

When a service fails or a supplier reports a breach, you need to log, triage, and resolve it in one place — with an unalterable audit trail behind every step.

A proper incident reporting platform should:

• Timestamp the moment an event is raised
• Route it to the right responders automatically
• Track its status through to closure
• Record every action, so no one can quietly rewrite the history

This lets you hit a regulator's reporting window with confidence, instead of reconstructing events from memory.

It's also the difference between knowing an impact tolerance has been breached and finding out weeks later.

2. Know which suppliers relate to your services

Most financial institutions now run on a web of cloud providers, payment processors, and software vendors. DORA treats that supply chain as part of your resilience. And it’s the part that firms find the most difficult.

In Deloitte's DORA European Survey, 46% named the Register of Information — the mandatory inventory of every ICT third-party contract — as their single most challenging requirement.

You need one hub that holds:

• An inventory of every ICT and service provider
• A risk assessment for each one
• The contracts, with renewal and review dates
• Active remediation plans you can actually track

Strong third-party risk management means you can answer, in minutes, which suppliers sit behind which important business services and what you're doing about the risks you've already flagged.

3. Control every IT change before it ships

A large share of outages are self-inflicted — an unplanned or untested change that takes a critical service down with it.

This means controlled change management is a resilience capability in its own right. Not just tick-box admin.

You need systems that document every change, push it through mandatory approval, and require testing before anything reaches production.

Done well, you're left with a clean record of what changed, who signed it off, and what testing it passed. This is exactly what an investigator asks for after something breaks.

4. Brief your staff the moment a crisis hits

During a live disruption, confusion can cost you more than the outage.

You need secure channels to push clear instructions the instant a crisis lands, so people know their roles and responsibilities immediately, rather than having to wait for direction.

But that takes more than a broadcast tool. Your staff need to have rehearsed the playbook in advance, and to be able to find the right policies and procedures under pressure.

5. Produce audit evidence on demand

Everything we’ve mentioned above only counts towards your compliance if you’ve got the evidence to back it up.

You need to generate complete logs and reports on demand — so that when a regulator arrives, you show compliance from one source rather than stitching it together across systems.

That turns an audit from a fire drill into a routine export you can access in a few clicks containing:

• Incident histories
• Policy acknowledgements
• Training completions
• Change approvals
• Supplier reviews

How Claromentis 11 ensures operational resilience

The hard part is rarely any single capability. It's getting all five to share the same data, the same permissions, and the same audit trail.

That's what Claromentis 11 is built to do. It’s one secure digital workplace for financial services that connects your people, processes, policies, and records — so financial services operational resilience stops being a patchwork of disconnected tools.

Our solution helps you:

1. Automate incident, change, and supplier workflows

InfoCapture, our no-code business process automation application, digitizes the processes resilience depends on.

You can build incident reporting, change management, and third-party risk documentation as structured e-forms — each with its own approval routes, SLAs, escalations, and notifications.

Every submission captures a full audit trail automatically, replacing the manual logs and email chains that slow your teams down.

Case study: Lone Star Credit Union

Lone Star Credit Union, a community credit union serving members across eight Texas counties, replaced a retiring intranet with Claromentis.

The team now runs streamlined support requests and a searchable knowledge base of its procedures from one platform. The kind of clean, documented process trail a resilience review rewards.

2. Reach the whole network in one push

When disruption is live, a single source of truth matters more than ever.

From a central intranet, you can push urgent announcements and priority alerts to your entire network instantly - with mandatory read confirmation so you know the message landed.

That's how you keep a dispersed, multi-site workforce coordinated, instead of guessing who saw what.

3. Stand up an incident response team in minutes

Spin up a dedicated project workspace for a specific incident with its own tasks, owners, and documents. And back it up with well-tagged SOP knowledge bases, so staff know exactly how to act under pressure. The guidance they need is one search away, not buried in a drive someone forgot to update.

Case study: Stanford Federal Credit Union

Stanford Federal Credit Union, which serves more than 50,000 members, uses Claromentis as the hub for its policies, procedures, and supporting documentation.

When a process question comes up, the current version is in one place instead of scattered across inboxes.

4. Turn resilience training into proof

Knowing your staff understand their crisis responsibilities is its own control.

Deliver mandatory training through the built-in learning management system. Then require staff to digitally acknowledge policies and show they've understood them — with completions and acknowledgements tracked automatically.

5. Show a regulator your evidence in a few clicks

Because incidents, changes, policies, training, and supplier reviews all run through the same platform, the evidence assembles itself.

Real-time audit dashboards give you a unified view of your resilience metrics — including incident volumes, policy acceptance, training completion, and supplier reviews — ready to show your regulator without any manual scrambling for information. For multi-site institutions, our Locations application presents that view branch by branch.

6. Operate within secure, regulator friendly foundations

Claromentis’ financial product is built on a secure, regulator-friendly foundation:

• SaaS, on-premise, or private and sovereign cloud hosting, so you can keep data where each jurisdiction requires
• SSO, two-factor authentication, IP-based restrictions, and encryption
• Granular permissions and detailed audit logs on every action
• ISO 27001:2022 certification

All of which means your IT and security teams have less risk to worry about and can focus on keeping your business safe. All while ensuring that you can keep your critical services running through any disruption.

To see how Claromentis can support your financial institution’s operational resilience, book a discussion call with one of our experts.

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