Security · Financial institutions

Security infrastructure for financial institutions.

Zero-trust foundations, DORA-aligned operating model, rehearsed incident response — built for institutions that get examined every year.

Overview

Security infrastructure infrastructure for financial institutions, built to the standard institutions in this sector are required to operate.

XVICA designs, builds, and operates this layer for financial institutions clients in the UK, US, Canada, and Australia. The work is specified against the regulatory regime, the operational profile, and the examination expectations of this sector before any code is written.

01Why it matters

What financial institutions cannot get wrong here.

  • Cyber incident reporting windows are hours, not days.
  • Third-party and ICT concentration risk is now examined explicitly.
  • Detection engineering as code is what separates mature programmes from ones that look mature.
  • SMCR makes security outcomes a named-individual responsibility.
02Regulatory posture

Named regimes, mapped controls

Regulatory requirements are translated into explicit control requirements, then mapped to tests and evidence collection. Nothing is implied.

UK & EU

DORA ICT risk, PS21/3, PRA SS2/21, NIS2 for in-scope entities, and FCA SYSC 3 and SYSC 13.

United States

NYDFS Part 500, FFIEC IT examination handbook, SR 20-24 business continuity, and SEC cybersecurity disclosure rules.

Commonwealth

APRA CPS 234, OSFI B-13, and sector-specific cybersecurity expectations.

03Reference architecture

Design decisions distinctive to this intersection

Components and design choices that recur across our work for this sector. Each deployment is specified individually.

Zero-trust foundations

Identity-aware access, mutual TLS everywhere, continuous authorisation, and workload identity distinct from human identity.

Detection engineering as code

Detection rules authored, reviewed, and tested in version control. Coverage is explicit, not inferred.

Rehearsed incident response

Severe-but-plausible scenarios exercised against the actual runbooks and actual people. Findings close in the engineering backlog.

HSM-backed key management

FIPS 140-2 Level 3 where required, documented rotation, quorum-controlled recovery, and segregation of duties.

Control evidence continuous, not point-in-time

Control effectiveness measured and exported on demand. SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PCI-DSS evidence produced by the platform.

04XVICA's approach

How we work in financial institutions.

Financial-services security is judged not on whether the programme looks right but on whether it holds up to examination and, in the worst case, to incident. We build with that discipline from the first meeting. Detection engineering is code, reviewed like code; incident response is rehearsed, not theoretical; the runbook that the on-call engineer opens at 2am is the same runbook the internal audit function reviewed in quiet conditions. DORA's operational-resilience expectations — important business services identified, impact tolerances set, severe-but-plausible scenarios tested, third-party dependencies mapped — are treated as design inputs rather than documentation exercises. Institutions that get this right spend less time preparing for examinations because the evidence is a consequence of operation; they also detect and contain incidents faster because the response was built for use, not for the slide deck.

Security infrastructure infrastructure for financial institutions.

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All security work·Financial institutions sector