EBA Publishes Guidelines on ICT and Security Risk Management

These guidelines respond to the EC's FinTech Action plan request for EBA to develop guidelines on ICT risk management and mitigation requirements in the financial sector in EU. The guidelines:

• Focus on the management and mitigation of ICT and security risks by establishing sound internal governance and an internal control framework that sets clear responsibilities for the staff of financial institutions, including for the management bodies
• Require financial institutions to maintain up-to-date inventories of their business functions, supporting processes and information assets and to classify them in terms of criticality, based on the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data
• Remind financial institutions to ensure the effectiveness of the risk-mitigating measures, as defined by their risk management framework, when outsourcing or using third-party providers
• Specify high-level principles on how ICT operations should be managed, including requirements to improve, when possible, the efficiency of ICT operations; implement logging and monitoring procedures for critical ICT operations; maintain an up-to-date inventory of their ICT assets; monitor and manage the life cycle of ICT assets; and implement backup plans and recovery procedures
• Specify expectations on business continuity management and developing response and recovery plans, including testing, and their consequent updating based on the test results
• Cover the management of relationship of payment service providers with payment service users to ensure that users are made aware of the security risks linked to the payment services and are provided with the tools to disable specific payment functionalities and monitor payment transactions

In implementing these guidelines, financial institutions should refer to the existing standards and leading best practices. These guidelines intend to be technology and methodology agnostic. The implementation of these guidelines should be done in accordance with the principle of proportionality, taking into account the scale and complexity of operations, the nature of the activity engaged in, the types of services provided, and the corresponding ICT and security risks related to the processes and services of financial institutions. These guidelines complement, and should be read in conjunction with, the supervisory assessment to the applicable institutions in EBA guidelines on ICT risk assessment under the Supervisory Review and Evaluation Process (EBA/GL/2017/05) and other relevant guidelines such as EBA guidelines on outsourcing arrangements (EBA/GL/2019/02). 

Related Links

• Press Release
• Guidelines (PDF)

Effective Date: June 30, 2020

Keywords: Europe, EU, Banking, CRD, PSD 2, ICT Risk, Cyber Risk, Proportionality, Operational Risk, Outsourcing Arrangements, Third-Party Arrangements, Fintech, EBA