DORA regulation explained: What it means for financial institutions in 2025

If your business is part of the EU financial system, or provides tech services to those who are, DORA applies to you.

But what is DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) and why was it introduced? Here’s what you need to know to stay compliant by 2025.

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is a new EU law that came into effect in January 2023, with enforcement starting January 17, 2025. 

It’s designed to make sure financial institutions can keep running, even during cyberattacks, IT failures, or other digital disruptions.

Put simply, DORA makes digital resilience a business-wide responsibility so institutions are ready for anything that could impact both technology and customers.

Today’s financial sector runs on complex digital systems, third-party providers, and constant data flows. As this digital ecosystem grows, so do the risks, think cyberattacks, IT outages, and unclear accountability when things go wrong.

Before DORA, every EU country had its own rules for handling these issues. The result? A patchwork of inconsistent standards.

DORA was created to fix that. It sets a common framework to help financial organizations across the EU manage digital risks more effectively and consistently.

DORA applies to a broad range of financial entities operating in the EU, including:

• Banks and credit institutions

• Investment firms and trading platforms

• Insurance and reinsurance companies

• Crypto service providers

• Payment and e-money institutions

• Crowdfunding platforms

• ICT third-party providers (like cloud services and software vendors)

In short: If your business is part of the EU financial system, or provides tech services to those who are, DORA applies to you.

To meet DORA’s requirements, financial entities need to focus on five key areas:

1. ICT (information communication technology) risk management

Organizations must put strong internal controls in place to manage digital risks. That means identifying threats, putting preventive measures in place, planning for incidents, and having reliable backup and recovery systems.

2. Incident reporting

Major ICT-related incidents must be reported quickly, often within hours, to the relevant national authority. The goal is early visibility and faster response.

3. Digital operational resilience testing

You can’t fix what you don’t test. DORA requires regular testing to make sure systems can handle disruptions. This includes basic vulnerability scans, penetration tests, and advanced threat-led penetration testing (TLPT) for high-impact organizations.

4. Third-party risk management

DORA puts heavy focus on your ICT vendors and service providers. You’ll need to:

• Keep a full register of all third-party ICT providers

• Conduct due diligence and risk assessments

• Update contracts with DORA-compliant clauses

• Have contingency and exit plans in place

5. Information sharing

DORA encourages financial entities to share cyber threat information with each other, securely and lawfully, to help strengthen the industry’s overall resilience.

It’s easy to confuse DORA with NIS2, another major EU regulation focused on cybersecurity. But they have different scopes:

• DORA is sector-specific. It applies only to financial services and their ICT third-party providers.

• NIS2 is broader, covering a wide range of essential sectors, like energy, transport, healthcare, and public administration.

Both aim to improve digital resilience, but DORA goes much deeper when it comes to managing operational and third-party ICT risks within the financial sector.

If DORA applies to your organization, now’s the time to get ready. The regulation became enforceable on January 17, 2025. 

And the consequences for non-compliance are serious: financial penalties can reach up to 2% of total annual turnover, depending on the severity of the breach and the entity involved.

Here’s how to get started:

Review your ICT risk management

Run a gap analysis to see how your current approach compares with DORA’s requirements. Where are the weak spots?

Map your third-party providers

Make a full list of all your ICT vendors (cloud services, APIs, software platforms) so you know exactly who you rely on.

Update contracts and SLAs

Check that your vendor agreements include the right clauses for incident reporting, audit rights, and data handling. DORA expects this level of control.

Build or refine your incident playbooks

You’ll need clear processes for spotting, reporting, and responding to digital incidents fast.

Prepare for testing

If your business is classified as a “significant entity,” threat-led penetration testing (TLPT) and other resilience tests may be mandatory. Start planning now.

DORA is a critical line of defense in a high-risk digital environment. As cyber threats grow in scale and complexity, the ability to withstand disruption is a baseline requirement.

For organizations in the financial sector, non-compliance could mean serious financial penalties, reputational damage, and even loss of customer trust.

By strengthening digital resilience, companies can:

• Build greater trust with customers

• Protect their reputation and financial stability

• Maintain consistent operations across EU markets

• Align with global standards for cybersecurity and risk management

DORA raises the bar for digital resilience. Meeting that bar is no longer optional, it’s essential.

DORA marks a major shift in how digital risk is managed across the EU’s financial sector. It holds organizations accountable not just for their own systems, but also for the third-party tech they depend on.

At Partisia, we help financial institutions stay ahead of these challenges. Our privacy-preserving technologies are designed to protect sensitive data during processing, support secure collaboration, and reduce risk across complex ecosystems.

This is how we make this journey easier and more effective:

• Our Multi-Party Computation (MPC) technology enables institutions to prepare for DORA while keeping sensitive information secure.

• With our fraud detection and AML platform, banks and financial organizations can collaborate securely in real time. They can map and flag suspicious activity across multiple institutions without exposing confidential data, helping detect and stop fraud before it escalates

• This real-time, encrypted collaboration delivers predictive insights and builds a robust defense against evolving cyber threats, turning compliance into a competitive advantage.

Together, DORA’s demand for operational resilience and Partisia’s innovative, privacy-first approach form a powerful combination for the future of secure finance.

In other words, we make compliance easier without compromising innovation or privacy.

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