Interbank Messaging and Resilience Program
Every mandatory SWIFT control attested on time, with a resilience register the board now uses.
Client name withheld by agreement- Client
- Regional bank, $40B+ in assets
- Region
- Texas, U.S.
- Year
- 2025
- Duration
- 22 weeks
- Scope
- 3 SWIFT environments · 140 critical ICT services
- Practice
- Financial Services
The challenge
What was at stake.
A fast-growing regional bank had added correspondent banking and an EU subsidiary in the same eighteen months. Its SWIFT attestation deadline was eleven weeks out, and its European supervisor had started asking for a DORA register of information the bank did not yet have.
Two programs, two sets of consultants and one exhausted operations team. The board wanted a single answer to a simple question: are we resilient, and can we prove it?
What we did
The approach, step by step.
- 01
One map of what matters
We traced 140 critical ICT services from customer channel to data center, third party and SWIFT interface, and agreed impact tolerances with the business owners who carry them.
- 02
SWIFT architecture confirmed
We confirmed the architecture type for all three messaging environments, tested every mandatory control and closed segmentation and operator-access gaps before the attestation window.
- 03
Register of information, built once
Contracts, providers and service dependencies went into one register that feeds both the DORA return and the bank’s own vendor risk process.
- 04
Severe but plausible, tested
Two scenario exercises, a payment-gateway outage and a compromised operator credential, run with the executive team and documented as evidence.
- 05
Handover the bank can run
Runbooks, owners and a quarterly testing calendar, so resilience stays a habit instead of a project.
Outcomes
What changed, in numbers.
- 100%
- of mandatory SWIFT controls attested on time
- 140
- critical ICT services mapped to tolerances
- 3
- messaging environments re-segmented
- 1
- register serving regulator and board
For the first time the board saw one picture of resilience, and every number in it could be traced to evidence.
Services delivered
Related engagements
More work in Financial Services.
-
U.S. Southwest · 18 weeks
Financial Services · 2025PCI DSS 4.0.1 Transition for a Payments ProcessorCardholder data environment cut by 61%, and every future-dated requirement in place before the deadline.
-
United States · 10 weeks
Offensive Security & Resilience · 2024Business Continuity and Crisis Exercise for an InsurerA board-level crisis exercise that exposed and closed four single points of failure.
-
Texas, U.S. · 12 weeks
Offensive Security & Resilience · 2024Vulnerability Management Program for a Credit UnionMean time to remediate critical findings brought down from 63 days to 9.
Let’s talk about your version of this.
Share what you are up against. A senior practitioner who has delivered this kind of work will reply within one business day.