FinTech Compliance: 4 Certifications (and 5 Vendors) to Consider 

It’s no secret that FinTech carries a lot of opportunity and the potential for a lot of risk—at least if you’re not putting the proper precautions in place. 

Are you taking all the FinTech compliance steps that your customers expect you to take? While certifications aren’t always required (like being PCI DSS compliant), not having them can have serious consequences for your company. (For example: Nilson Report found that fraud losses related to payment cards will reach $34.66 billion in 2022.) 

Here are four of the most important FinTech certifications your company needs to comply with in 2022—plus five vendors that can make your certification process much easier. 

Which certifications are most important for FinTech compliance? 

SOC 2 certification

SOC stands for “System and Organization Controls.” It was created by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). Having a SOC 2 report means you can show your customers that your organization takes seriously the controls related to security, availability, and processing integrity of your users’ data and privacy systems. 

SOC 2 is the second type of SOC report, used to audit the overall management of customer data. SOC1 reports are used to audit internal controls relevant to a customer’s financial systems. Both SOC 1 or SOC 2 report usage have restricted access. SOC 3 on the other hand, is a simplified report that is publicly available for transparency. 

For an auditor to complete your SOC 2 certification, you must demonstrate how you comply with one or more of the five Trust Services Criteria. These categories are not easy to meet and most companies need at least six months to generate their SOC 2 report. Since each criteria isn’t mandatory, it’s up to your company to choose your criteria, determine how you’ll meet them, and execute on that plan.

Trust Services Criteria include:

• Security 
• Privacy 
• Confidentiality 
• Processing integrity 
• Availability 

PCI DSS certification

These security standards are more well known since they ensure the trustworthiness of payment card transactions worldwide. (The acronym stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.) This certification shows you have the controls in place around card holder data to reduce credit card fraud. 

If your organization handles cardholder data, both Mastercard and Visa require you to be PCI compliant. What happens if you’re found to not be PCI compliant during a data breach? You’ll see fines, penalties, lost consumer confidence, legal costs, or even a ban against accepting payment cards. 

ISO 27001 certification

The ISO 27001 is an international standard that provides a management framework for implementing an information security management system (ISMS). Your ISMS should ensure the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of all your corporate data including financial information and employee data. 

While not obligatory, this certification is designed to show how your company invests in your tools and systems to protect your data. This is not a one-and-done project, ISO 27001 requires regularly scheduled assessment audits to ensure your ISMS operates as intended. 

HITRUST certification

The Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) is an organization governed by the healthcare industry which maintains the Common Security Framework (CSF). It helps healthcare providers show their security and compliance in other standards as well, like ISO 27000 series and HIPAA.

HITRUST CSF builds on US healthcare laws, like HIPAA, to establish requirements for use and safeguarding of individually identifiable health information. There are three levels of assessment that your organization can reach:  

1. Self assessment 
2. CSF validated 
3. CSF certified

Violating HIPAA comes with steep penalties, depending on whether the cause is deemed “reasonable” or “willful neglect.” Fines can range from $100 per record to $1.5 million per year. There are also criminal charges that can result in jail time. 

5 FinTech compliance vendors you can rely on 

Tackling these certifications on your own can take a long time and be costly. Compliance partners can help you monitor and collect evidence on your company’s security controls. They can also streamline compliance workflows to ensure you’re ready for an audit. 

Here are our top five vendor recommendations: 

Drata

Rated 4.9 out of 5 stars on G2

Drata helps companies secure compliance certifications for SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR. They offer an automated and continuous monitoring system that lets you stay ready for an audit. They also integrate with over fifty tools to keep an eye on your entire SaaS stack. 

Drata’s platform removes the manual work and let’s your company monitor your compliance status with a single view of controls, people, devices, applications, vendors, and risk. They also partner with audit firms that can take over the certification process when you’re ready.

Laika

Rated 4.8 out of 5 stars on G2

Laika calls itself the end-to-end compliance hub. The company helps secure certification for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, and others. Their platform offers an Integrated Audit. Through the audit, they performs gap analysis, curates control implementation task lists, and manages your prep schedule. They even interface with auditors directly. 

Laika has guided workflows for security standards, and lets you create policy documents from templates. You can also onboard and monitor every user, device, and vendor that engages with your infrastructure.

SecureFrame

Rated 4.8 out of 5 stars on G2

SecureFrame offers companies of all sizes a platform for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and PCI DSS compliance that reduces the time to audit from months to weeks. The platform only needs read-only access to monitor and provision your IT infrastructure to be SOC 2 compliant. 

SecureFrame can monitor over 150 cloud services including AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. They also partner with auditors who want to use SecureFrame to support their own customers.

Vanta

Rated 4.6 out of 5 stars on G2

Vanta provides a security monitoring platform that helps companies with frameworks for SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and GDPR. Aside from offering the same services as other vendors – like continuous monitoring, read-only integrations, and task trackers – Vanta helps track background checks and security training for new hires as well. 

They also have their own Vanta trained CPA auditors that know how to use the platform and have agreed to a fixed discount for Vanta customers. 

Tugboat Logic

Rated 4.6 out of 5 stars on G2

Here at Quolum, we used security assurance platform Tugboat Logic to help us with our SOC 2 compliance and certification. They provide a centralized InfoSec repository that lets you automatically generate the policy templates that you need, which saved Quolum weeks of framing, reviewing, and approving policies.  

Tugboat also offers a library of ready to use content for over 10 security frameworks that cover a scoping survey, policies, contros, evidence collection, and audit readiness.  

Streamline your FinTech certifications

Prioritizing your security and compliance can help your company retain customers by giving them peace of mind that the proper controls are in place. At Quolum, we know it’s crucial that we’re compliant as we help companies manage their spend. 

To save your company the time and cost of managing your SOC 2, PCI DSS, HITRUST, and ISO 27001 certifications and audits, consider using one of these five security and compliance automation vendors.