DORA is Coming: What FinTech Devs Need to Know

DORA is Coming: What FinTech Devs Need to Know

While I was working on the auth system maintenance, I was reminded of a major shift hitting the European financial sector: DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act).

For years, compliance was about protecting data (like GDPR). Now, it's about protecting the uptime of the system.

Cybersecurity vs. Resilience

There is a subtle but massive difference between these two concepts:

• Cybersecurity is trying to stop the hacker from getting in. It is defensive.

• Resilience is assuming the hacker will get in (or the server will burn down) and proving you can recover instantly. It is recovery-focused.

DORA mandates that financial institutions (and the tech vendors who serve them) must prove they can withstand a severe disruption. It forces me to perform Dependency Mapping.

If you use AWS for hosting, Stripe for payments, and Twilio for SMS, you are dependent on them. Under DORA, you need to answer: What happens if Stripe goes down for 24 hours? Do you have a backup payment rail? Or does your business stop?

For developers, this means the "Happy Path" (where everything works perfectly) is no longer enough. I have to code for the disaster. I have to build retry mechanisms, circuit breakers, and failover states. It makes development harder, but it makes the web stronger.

Best,

Gerasimos Makris Founder of g-makris.com AI Web Developer | Double Master's in MBA & FinTech and Blockchain

Tech Glossary & Concepts

• DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act): A European Union regulation that ensures the financial sector is resilient in the event of a severe operational disruption (like a cyber attack or server failure).
• GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation): The toughest privacy and security law in the world, drafted and passed by the European Union.
• Circuit Breaker: A design pattern in software. If a service (like a payment gateway) fails repeatedly, the "circuit breaker" trips and stops the system from trying to call it, preventing the whole application from crashing.
• Failover: A backup operational mode in which the functions of a system component are assumed by secondary system components when the primary component becomes unavailable.