Meeting the monitoring requirements for DORA compliance requires financial institutions to have a high degree of visibility around file transfer. However, increasing MFT visibility is virtually impossible when an organisation uses disparate legacy systems for file transfer.
Consolidating your file exchange into a single solution simplifies operations, making visibility, monitoring and reporting for DORA compliance and other regulations much easier. It also reduces costs and supports organisations with the increasing amounts of data that they handle each day.
Why Increasing MFT Visibility is Key
A 360-degree, near-real-time, end-to-end view of the full file transfer cycle is needed to ensure the high reliability that trading partners, customers and internal users expect. It also features in DORA compliance as monitoring data better enables financial entities to identify sources of risk. In turn, this enables organisations to be proactive and take precautions to reduce the likelihood of fraud, cybercrime, and other IT incidents jeopardising security.
Business Benefits of MFT Visibility
The world’s leading financial organisations have already realised the importance of data monitoring solutions in increasing efficiency and reducing risk. Factors which are driving today’s financial organisations to improve their data monitoring capabilities include:
• Rapid data analysis. Being able to analyse data across the whole B2B and MFT environment improves efficiency and trading partner relationships.
• Error reduction. Employees need to be able to respond quickly in order to resolve issues in file transfer before they affect SLAs.
• Risk reduction. Being able to view data transfers across the entire B2B and MFT environment reduces the risk of data loss by enabling bottlenecks to be identified and resolved before resulting in downtime and data loss.
• Simplifying compliance. Without visibility over data exchange, the monitoring requirements of finance industry regulations such as DORA present an almost insurmountable challenge.
Simplifying File Transfer Operations
Many financial entities still use fragmented payments systems which are mostly focused on single parts of the system. This ‘siloed’ approach makes increasing MFT visibility difficult due to its complexity.
As research shows organisations are handling increased volumes of data (growing by as much as 68% month-on-month) monitoring data over fragmented trader systems becomes an even more complex problem. This affects an organisation’s ability to monitor data transactions and quickly identify issues for compliance. Efficiency in meeting SLAs is also decreased, negatively affecting the customer experience. Using disparate, legacy systems for data transfer also increases risk. Over time, the costs of maintaining these legacy systems and their effects on productivity become higher than investing in modernising file transfer systems.
Integration provides a solution to multiple, siloed payment systems. To increase MFT visibility and enable efficient management of increasing data transfer volumes, financial institutions need a unified data exchange platform to manage payments and data transactions of all types and industry standards (ISO, Visa, SWIFT etc.)
How the World’s Leading Banks Handle Data Exchange
Used by the world’s 100 largest banks, the IBM Sterling Data Exchange product suite provides financial organisations with a unified, reliable file transfer platform, increasing MFT visibility and allowing them to monitor file transfer both internally and across all trading partners. Using this centralised data exchange platform delivers higher performance in managing big transaction volumes with lower costs. Increasing MFT visibility also means meeting stringent compliance regulations like DORA is no longer a problem.
At the core of this Data Exchange suite of products is the IBM Sterling B2B Integrator. This provides the integration necessary to create a unified transaction system. IBM describe the product as a ‘transaction engine that runs the processes you define and manages them according to your business requirements.’
IBM Sterling File Gateway then adds the capabilities necessary to intelligently monitor, administer, route, and transform high volumes of inbound and outbound files. It also may be configured to enforce corporate policies such as the encryption of all communications.
Taking the Work Out of DORA Compliance
These add-on products from the IBM Sterling Data Exchange range provide monitoring capabilities plus ease of auditing and reporting to make compliance with DORA and other finance industry regulations simple.
IBM Sterling Control Centre provides an additional monitoring and governance solution which is also containerised. Control Centre tracks critical events wherever they occur and alerts stakeholders to issues with transfers or servers. In addition, role-based dashboards can be easily customised to meet the needs of risk, compliance, and business users.
With built-in IBM Cognos analytics, IBM Sterling Control Centre Monitor greatly simplifies the auditing and documentation required for demonstrating DORA compliance by providing automated reports. It is designed to be simple to understand for all, including non-technical business users.
Find out more about MFT and DORA Compliance in our articles ICT Risk Management: DORA Compliance for Financial Entities and Reducing Risk around FIle Transfer and Increasing Resilience.
Discover how DORA may impact on your IT systems and remediation plans by booking a FREE SABREX DORA Consultation today.
Article by C. James