EBA Proposes to Revise Guidelines on Incident Reporting Under PSD2

The existing guidelines on major incident reporting set out, among others, the criteria, thresholds, and methodology to be used by the payment service providers to determine whether or not an operational or security incident should be considered major and how the said incident should be notified to the competent authorities in the home member state. The consultation paper proposes the following:

• Introduction of the new incident classification criterion "breach of security measures" to capture security incidents when a breach of the security measures of the payment service provider has an impact on the availability, integrity, confidentiality, and/or authenticity of the payment services data, processes, and/or systems.
• Introduction of changes to the thresholds for calculation of the criteria "transactions affected" and "payment service users affected"
• Use of a standardized file for reporting major incident reports, streamlining the reporting template, and adding further granularity to the reported causes of incidents and aligning those incidents to other incident reporting frameworks in EU, to improve quality of the collected reports
• Removal of the regular updates on the intermediate report from payment service providers to the competent authorities, extension of deadline for submission of the final report, and significant reduction in the fields in the reporting template, with the goal of reducing the reporting burden to payment service providers

EBA has aligned the taxonomy on the causes of the major incidents to other incident reporting frameworks that had been developed by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity and the Single Supervisory Mechanism of the Eurozone and has added further granularity to some causes of incidents. EBA mentions that EC has published, on September 24, 2020, a new EU legislative proposal for the EU regulatory framework on digital operational resilience, which contains a proposal for incident reporting that is inspired by PSD2 but goes beyond the payments-related incidents. The final details of that framework will not be known for several years, after which further time is expected to pass before they become legally applicable. However, the revised guidelines proposed in this consultation paper are expected to become applicable in the fourth quarter of 2021. These revised guidelines will remain in force at least until the EU regulatory framework on digital operational resilience requirements enters into force. 

Related Links

• Press Release
• Proposed Guidelines (PDF)

Comment Due Date: December 14, 2020

Effective Date (expected): Q4 2021

Keywords: Europe, EU, Banking, PSD2, Reporting, Payment Service Providers, Incident Reporting, Cyber Risk, Operational Resilience, Operational Resilience, Operational Risk, EBA