“It wasn’t a breach that triggered the board’s emergency meeting – it was a failed compliance audit.”
In financial services, security and compliance are no longer parallel tracks.
With regulations like DORA, PCI DSS v4.0, and NIS2 raising the stakes on cryptographic governance, your ability to pass an audit now hinges on your capacity to fully control your digital certificates and cryptographic keys.
Yet, most financial institutions still treat Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) as an afterthought, despite PKI being critical compliance infrastructure.
In this blog, we’ll explore why fragmented PKI is a growing audit liability, what regulators expect next, and how Keyfactor’s expertise and platform help banks regain control before compliance issues turn into costly fines – or worse, operational outages.
Governance Failure Risks
Expired certificates have brought down entire payment systems, crippling revenue flow and reputation overnight.
Now, it’s time to face a more pervasive challenge:
- CISOs are being asked directly
“Do you know every certificate in use? Who owns them? How they’re issued? Are policies enforced consistently?”
- Auditors want proof
“Can you demonstrate controls on key management and algorithm strength?”
- Boards demand answers
“How are you managing our cryptography risk across the new acquisitions and a multi-cloud environment?”
If your answer relies on fragmented teams, manual spreadsheets, or guesswork, you’re at risk of audit failure and financial penalties.
Why Compliance Is Slipping Through the Cracks
Most financial institutions struggle to demonstrate PKI control because:
- Certificate management is fragmented across business units and geographies.
- There’s no centralized inventory of certificates or keys, so visibility is poor.
- Cloud and DevOps teams often issue certificates outside formal policies, sometimes via unauthorized or rogue tools.
- Compliance audits rely on manual, error-prone processes instead of automated, real-time reporting.
The result? Regulators see disorganized cryptographic controls as a glaring vulnerability. And with increasing audit rigor, non-compliance isn’t an option.
What DORA, NIS2, and PCI DSS v4.0 Actually Require
To understand the pressure, here’s what some major regulations are now explicitly demanding from FinServ organizations:
- DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act):
Requires continuous operational resilience, with cryptographic controls that guarantee data confidentiality, integrity, and availability—even during cyber incidents.
- NIS2 Directive:
Mandates governance over cryptographic keys and certificates, plus identity assurance across complex supply chains and hybrid environments.
- PCI DSS v4.0:
Tightens requirements for cryptographic inventory management, key lifecycle control, and audit-ready proof of compliance.
Regulators are also increasing expectations around post-quantum readiness, demanding evidence that banks have plans and technical capability to adapt cryptography well before quantum computers become a reality.
The themes above and PQC are aligned; as the world’s security experts continually batten the hatches against new and potential threats, the ability to control and migrate cryptography as a whole becomes central to defense.
To help financial services organizations meet these complex demands, the NIST FinServ Checklist outlines critical preparatory steps before 2030.
The checklist is a practical guide to:
- Complete inventory and classification of cryptographic assets.
- Establishing and enforcing crypto-agility policies that accommodate both classical and post-quantum algorithms.
- Developing continuous monitoring and real-time reporting capabilities for cryptographic compliance.
- Integrating trust management into operational workflows, including DevOps and M&A environments.
- Preparing clear audit evidence and documentation to demonstrate compliance and resilience against emerging threats.
Following this checklist ensures your PKI governance is not only aligned with current regulations but also future-proofed against the post-quantum cryptographic revolution.
Auditors Want Evidence, Not Explanations
It’s no longer enough to say, “Yes, we have PKI.” Today, you need to prove:
- Complete visibility: A real-time inventory of every certificate, key, and cryptographic asset.
- Policy enforcement: Clear audit trails showing that certificate issuance follows approved policies (e.g., CA source, algorithm strength, key length).
- Risk quantification and reduction: Metrics on mean-time-to-remediate (MTTRenew) expired or misconfigured certificates.
- Crypto-agility: Demonstrated readiness for new algorithms, including hybrid classical/post-quantum certificates.
If you can’t produce these insights in an automated dashboard or report, your next audit is likely to become a painful ordeal.
The Operational Bottleneck: Siloed PKI
Every time your teams issue certificates independently – using different certificate authorities (CAs), manual scripts, or disconnected tools – you lose:
- Governance: Policies become inconsistent or unenforced.
- Control: Certificates get lost, forgotten, or improperly renewed.
- Auditability: Records become fragmented, making compliance proof impossible.
- Security: The risk of outages and breaches rises dramatically.
For example, one regional bank Keyfactor worked with discovered 40,000 unmanaged certificates scattered across the enterprise during a merger. Nearly half had no assigned owner, and over 1,000 were expired – creating immediate operational and compliance risk.
How Keyfactor Helps Banks Take Back Control
Keyfactor’s platform is a holistic trust infrastructure management solution purpose-built for financial services. Here’s how we help FinServ leaders reclaim compliance control:
- Unified Certificate and Key Inventory
We automate the discovery of every certificate and cryptographic asset across complex hybrid environments, whether it’s on-prem, in AWS, Azure, GCP, or inside containeres. No asset goes unnoticed.
- Policy-Driven Automation and Enforcement
Keyfactor enforces standardized issuance policies at scale – across all business units and partners – eliminating rogue or out-of-policy certificate creation. Renewal workflows and automated alerts ensure certificates don’t expire unnoticed.
- Real-Time Compliance Reporting
Our platform provides audit-ready reports with granular evidence of policy enforcement, certificate health, and crypto-agility status. This dramatically reduces audit prep time and builds boardroom confidence.
- Post-Quantum Readiness Built In
Keyfactor is prioritizing PQC with support for hybrid certificates and integration with emerging post-quantum algorithms across all trust infrastructure.
- Seamless Integration with DevOps and M&A Workflows
PKI underpins APIs, service mesh authentication, and developer pipelines. Keyfactor integrates directly with CI/CD tools, Kubernetes, and more to enforce trust at DevOps speed, and fits every tool, CA and environment you need.
From Reactive to Strategic Trust Governance
Financial services firms no longer have to tolerate a patchwork of PKI solutions. With Keyfactor, your CISO can shift from reacting to certificate crises to governing trust proactively – turning PKI from a legacy liability into a strategic asset that drives secure innovation and compliance.
Next Steps: Take Control of Your Compliance Today
- Start by discovering your cryptographic landscape with Keyfactor’s platform.
- Establish policy-driven issuance and automation to eliminate certificate chaos.
- Deliver audit-ready reports that satisfy regulators and impress boards.
- Lay the groundwork for post-quantum cryptography so your business is ready.
📥 Resources to Learn More
Download The Security Leader’s Digital Trust Playbook: Financial Services Edition for a full 7-step plan to modernize and future-proof your trust infrastructure. Have questions or want to see Keyfactor in action? Reach out here — we’re here to help!
