Today marks the effective date of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and with it, additional incident reporting obligations for in-scope financial entities. 

With the aim of standardising the incident reporting process for financial entities throughout the EU, from today, in-scope financial entities must report any ‘major ICT-related incidents’ to their relevant competent authority. 1For the majority of financial entities within the scope of DORA in Ireland, this will be the Central Bank of Ireland while for others (such as pensions trustees) it will be the Pensions Authority. These new incident reporting obligations apply in addition to

Continue Reading Navigating the DORA ICT Incident Reporting Obligations

Last week MoneyConf firmly put Dublin in the Fintech spotlight. The pressure on financial services firms to make better use of technology to reduce costs and improve customer service shows no sign of relenting. At the same time they need to carefully navigate the related regulatory challenges around technology outsourcing. A member of the ECB Supervisory Board recently observed that banks are not “technological houses” and said that the fragmentation of banks’ services across a range of external providers creates a “challenge” for banks’ leaders, who retain responsibility. This statement will resonate, in particular, with financial institutions looking to understand how much they are currently using, and how they can make more and better use of, cloud based technology solutions.
Continue Reading European Banking Authority Recommendations on Outsourcing to Cloud Service Providers

On 14 September 2015, Minister of State for International Financial Services Simon Harris TD launched the FPAI, a new trade association founded to further the interests of stakeholders involved in the rapidly evolving Irish FinTech sector.  

FinTech (financial technology) is the term used to describe any technology applied to financial services. Across the broad spectrum of FinTech products available, everyday examples include mobile banking, peer to peer lending, digital currency (e.g. Bitcoin), crowdfunding (e.g. Kickstarter) and online payments systems (e.g. Stripe). Continue Reading Minister for International Financial Services launches FinTech and Payments Association of Ireland (FPAI)