Banking
Resilience you can demonstrate
Customers expect payments, accounts, and digital channels to work every day, and supervisors expect you to show how you keep them running. DarkGuard gives banks and payment firms one accountable partner for cybersecurity, operational resilience, and governance, so your leadership team can evidence control and keep its focus on customers and growth.
The challenge
Resilience is now a board responsibility
Payments, lending, trading, and customer channels depend on technology that has to be available every hour of the day, and much of it is run by third parties. When an important service fails, customers, supervisors, and the board all expect answers quickly. Four pressures in particular now reach the leadership team.
Supervisors expect tested resilience
Banks are expected to identify their important services, set limits on how much disruption each can tolerate, and show through testing that they can stay within them.
Third parties sit inside your critical services
Cloud providers, core banking platforms, and payment processors carry much of your operational risk. Your board remains accountable for how they are chosen, monitored, and replaced if needed.
Incident reporting runs on tight deadlines
Material incidents have to be reported to supervisors quickly, often within hours, with facts that hold up to later review.
Leadership time is finite
Every hour your COO or chief risk officer spends reconciling reports from several providers is an hour away from customers, products, and growth.
How we support you
Security, resilience, and governance from one partner
Banks often work with a range of specialists for security testing, monitoring, incident response, and resilience. Each may do its part well, but your teams end up joining the results together for the board and the supervisor. We deliver this work through one engagement, led by senior people, with one point of accountability to you.
Governance, risk & compliance
Governance and risk management that give your board a clear view and stand up to supervisory review.
- — ICT risk management & governance: a defined risk appetite, a living risk register, and board-level reporting
- — Third-party & supply chain risk management: due diligence and ongoing monitoring of cloud, core banking, and payment providers
- — Compliance & policy framework: policies aligned to the rules you answer to, with evidence packs ready for audits
- — Security awareness & training: role-based training and phishing simulations, including payment fraud scenarios
Operational resilience
Confidence that your important services keep running, and evidence to show it.
- — Operational resilience & important business services: important services identified, impact tolerances set, and dependencies mapped
- — Business continuity & cyber resilience testing: scenario testing and tabletop exercises for the board and crisis team
- — Recovery planning & business continuity: continuity and disaster recovery plans for your important services
- — Recovery execution & system rebuilding: clean rebuilds and integrity checks before systems return to service
Managed detection & response
Continuous monitoring, so unusual activity is spotted and handled early.
- — MDR & XDR services (24/7 managed detection & response): monitoring and response across devices, identities, network, and cloud, around the clock
- — SIEM engineering & operations: log data from your critical systems collected and reviewed in one place
- — Threat intelligence & detection engineering: detection tuned to the threats that target banks and payment firms
- — Security operations centre (SOC) design & staffing support: an operating model for your own SOC, or interim staffing while you build one
Incident response & forensics
An experienced response team on call, working to a plan agreed with you in advance.
- — Security incident response: fast triage and containment, organised around your regulatory reporting deadlines
- — Regulatory incident reporting & playbooks: thresholds, timelines, and notification templates ready before they are needed
- — Digital forensics & containment: evidence collected and preserved with a clear chain of custody
- — Crisis communication & stakeholder management: coordinated communication with customers, staff, and supervisors
Attack surface management
A clear view of where you are exposed, with every finding tracked until it is fixed.
- — Penetration testing & adversary simulation: realistic attack simulations against infrastructure, applications, and people
- — Vulnerability management & assessment: regular scanning, a prioritised remediation queue, and tracking to closure
- — Asset discovery & inventory: a current inventory of systems and data, classified by criticality
- — Configuration & hardening reviews: critical systems checked against hardening standards
Identity & data protection
The right people with access to the right systems, and customer data protected at every layer.
- — Identity & access management: identity governance, privileged-access management, multi-factor authentication, and regular access reviews
- — Data security & privacy protection: data classification and data-loss prevention for customer and transaction data
- — Encryption & key management: encryption standards and key management with a full audit trail
Every service runs to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0. Services can be delivered as advisory projects, as managed services, or as a combination of both.
How we engage
How we work with you
Assess
A fixed-scope review of where you stand against what your supervisor expects. You receive a summary for the board and a prioritised plan.
Build
We close the priority gaps in governance, controls, and recovery. Every finding gets an owner and a remediation date.
Run
We deliver the agreed services day to day and meet with you every quarter to review progress against your risk appetite.
Additional services
Specialist services when you need them
Virtual CISO
Senior security leadership at board level, as your security function or alongside your own team. Includes fractional CISO leadership, board & executive cyber reporting, and regulator & external engagement.
ICT services
Cloud infrastructure & migration, network & connectivity, end-user computing & workspace, a managed service desk, and IT infrastructure & systems management, run to a defined standard.
AI enablement
AI adoption is moving faster than AI governance at most regulated firms. From an AI readiness assessment to AI model risk & bias assessment and LLM & generative AI security testing, we help make AI in credit, fraud, and customer processes defensible to your board and supervisor.
Specialised services
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration planning: an inventory of the cryptography you use today and a structured roadmap for moving to quantum-safe methods.
Regulatory fluency
Fluent in the rules you answer to
Whichever supervisor you answer to, the expectations follow the same themes. We work with your compliance function and your technology team in the same conversation, and where your group operates in more than one jurisdiction, we set up one control environment that covers all of them.
Governance and accountability
Clear ownership of ICT and cyber risk, a defined risk appetite, and regular reporting to the board.
Operational resilience
Important services identified, impact tolerances set, and recovery tested against severe but plausible scenarios.
Outsourcing and third parties
Due diligence, contracts, ongoing monitoring, and exit plans for the providers your services depend on.
Incident reporting
Material incidents classified and reported within the deadlines your supervisor sets, with a clear record of each decision.
Evidence
Policies, tests, and remediation records kept current, so audits and supervisory reviews start from documents that already exist.
Talk to us about where your bank stands today and what to prioritise first.
Speak with our team