ISO 27001 for Fintech Companies

Banks, insurers and other regulated firms must manage the risk of their suppliers, so they ask fintech vendors for evidence of security controls, incident handling and continuity. An ISO 27001 certificate from an accredited body answers many of those questions at once.

In the EU, DORA adds contractual and due-diligence requirements for ICT suppliers to financial entities. ISO 27001 does not make you DORA-compliant, but a working ISMS covers a large share of what customers ask for. See our DORA page.

If you store, process or transmit card data, PCI DSS applies as well, and scoping decides how much of it reaches you. See our PCI DSS page. If you sell to US customers, SOC 2 is often requested. See our SOC 2 page. The controls overlap, so we plan them together and reuse evidence.

Scope the product, infrastructure and people that handle customer and financial data. A tight scope is faster and cheaper to audit, and can be widened later.

The industry norm is six to nine months. For a focused scope and a responsive team we target a complete Stage 2 audit within 75 days of kickoff, subject to certification-body scheduling. Cost covers consultancy support, optional tooling and the certification body's fees, and we quote after a short scoping call.

The work follows the same path every time: scope and kickoff, gap diagnostic, build the policies and controls, operate them so they generate evidence, internal audit and management review, then the certification audit. See the full ISO 27001 process.

A bank reviews vendors through its own risk process, so the questions differ from buyer to buyer. They tend to circle the same topics, and an ISO 27001 programme should cover each of them.

• How you identify and treat security risks, and whether leadership reviews them.
• Who can reach customer and payment data, how access is granted and removed, and how often it is reviewed.
• How you handle incidents: detection, escalation, customer notification and lessons learned.
• How you keep the service running, including backups, recovery testing and continuity plans.
• How you manage your own suppliers, such as cloud providers and sub-processors.
• How changes reach production and how they are tested first.
• Whether independent penetration tests are run and findings are tracked to closure.

ISO 27001 does not remove these questions. It gives you a certificate and a Statement of Applicability to point to, so answers come from documented practice instead of being written from scratch each time. Our gap diagnostic shows where your current answers are thin.

The scope statement decides what the auditor examines and what the certificate says. For a fintech it usually includes the product and the production environment that process customer and financial data, the cloud accounts behind them, the engineering, operations and support teams with access, and the supporting tools that touch customer data, such as ticketing and logging.

Marketing sites, internal experiments and entities that never touch customer data can often stay outside the first certificate. Leaving them out shortens the audit, and the scope can be widened at a later audit.

Do not shrink the scope so far that the certificate stops being useful. A bank that sees a scope covering only your office network will ask about the product anyway. Write the scope around the service your buyer actually uses.

A few areas slow down most fintech projects.

Supplier management comes first. Fintechs rely on cloud platforms, payment processors, identity-check providers and data vendors. The auditor will want a supplier list, a risk rating for each, and evidence that you reviewed the important ones, for example their own certifications or security reports.

Change control comes next. Teams that ship daily often have good habits and no records. Pull request approvals, automated tests and deployment logs can serve as evidence, provided you write down the process and show it is followed.

Then come access reviews and leaver handling. Auditors sample accounts and check whether people who left lost access promptly. A scheduled quarterly review with a signed record is easy to run and easy to prove.

Business continuity is the last one. Most teams have backups and few have tested a restore. Run a restore test, write down the result, and fix what fails.

The same records count towards DORA and PCI DSS work if either applies to you. For help sequencing the project, read ISO 27001 for startups or ISO 27001 for UK companies, and see how certification support works from kickoff to certificate.