Arnas Lasys
AcrossLimits
FinTech in Europe is scaling fast, from mobile-first banks and payments to Robo-advice and embedded finance. However, this ongoing digitalisation process increases the risks of being targeted by cybercriminals. Phishing kits are cheap and increasingly sophisticated, ransomware groups are professionalised, and social engineering is leveraging AI-generated voices and deepfakes. The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity’s (ENISA) dedicated finance-sector threat landscape (Jan 2023-Jun 2024) highlights finance as a prime target and has analysed 488 publicly reported incidents across Europe. Meanwhile Europol’s Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment 2024 flags the growing role of AI and deepfakes in social-engineering and payment fraud.
This changing threat mix is evolving at the same time as a stronger resilience agenda is being pushed forward. The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) has applied across the EU since 17 January 2025, making ICT risk management and operational resilience core elements for financial entities. As a directly applicable regulation, it sets binding requirements on risk management, incident reporting, resilience testing, and oversight of third-party ICT risk. It also establishes EU-level supervision for designated critical ICT service providers, such as major cloud platforms. In addition, The NIS2 Directive has widened the scope of what is classified essential and important entities, and it required Member States to transpose the rules by 17 October 2024. This also means that the predecessor, NIS1, was repealed on 18 October 2024. Therefore, enforcement is now playing out via national laws, including for many FinTech-adjacent service providers in cloud, data centres, and managed services. Furthermore ,the EU’s payments framework has been in a process of being updated through the PSD3/Payment Services Regulation (PSR), which has been in inter-institutional negotiation. The European Council of the EU had come to an agreement in its position in June 2025 to reduce payment fraud, better protect consumers and improve transparency. The anticipated implication involves changes that will ripple through API security, data access and incident handling. The next step is for negotiations to take place with the European Parliament.
Against this backdrop, staying ahead requires a shift to continuous assurance. Zero-trust principles are based on authenticating and authorising every user, device and workload. They become practical when combined with strong identity controls such as hardware-bound keys and phishing-resistant MFA, together with least-privilege access and segmentation. Encrypting data both when it’s stored and when it’s transmitted is now the bare minimum standard in FinTech cybersecurity, as well as minimising what is collected, and for how long, in order to minimise the breach risks. FinTechs need to watch for threats across all parts of their systems, from user devices and cloud platforms to identity checks and payment flows. Smart analytics can flag unusual activity in real time, but the tools must be carefully tuned so they don’t raise too many false alarms. If security checks slow down a payment or make the process frustrating, users won’t accept them.
Social engineering remains one of the most common ways attackers break into financial systems, and AI tools are making these scams even more convincing. The best defenses combine technical frictions, such as call-back verification, transaction-risk analysis, and step-up authentication, with human-focused approaches that help staff and customers spot and report manipulation. On the institutional side, both DORA and NIS2 emphasise supply-chain resilience: knowing who your critical vendors are, testing failovers, and ensuring contracts allow for audits, logging, and timely incident disclosure
For product leaders, resilience is a feature customers can feel. Clear security status in-app, transparent communications during incidents, and visible controls such as; downloadable device logs, session management, easy MFA resets, and build trust. For B2B FinTechs selling into banks or corporates, demonstrable alignment with DORA and NIS2 obligations, mapped to control frameworks and backed by independent assurance, can shorten procurement cycles and distinguish established professionals from look-alikes…
Large banks often have the resources to run advanced cybersecurity teams, while many startups don’t. To bridge that gap, European information-sharing groups and national CSIRTs (Computer Security Incident Response Teams) provide smaller firms with timely alerts on new threats. ENISA and the EU CSIRTs Network, for example, regularly publish updates and sector reports that help teams spot issues faster. The key is to focus on a few trusted sources and turn their insights into action, updating playbooks, fine-tuning detection tools, and fixing vulnerabilities quickly.
Cybersecurity can also be understood as part of a brand and growth strategy, as much as it is part of a compliance strategy. In Europe’s competitive financial market, how a business communicates during an incident and how quickly it restores service are remembered by customers. Under NIS2, boards are directly accountable for resilience outcomes, while DORA will subject financial entities to testing and supervision. Firms that can demonstrate fewer fraud losses, faster detection and recovery times, and reduced high-severity incidents will translate those results into lower customer churn, stronger partnerships, and higher trust.
The next wave of attacks is likely to focus on FinTech’s weak spots. That means exploiting APIs in open banking, sneaking fake digital identities through onboarding, using AI deepfakes to trick customer support, and targeting widely used third-party software and wallets in the supply chain. The regulatory wave will also keep rolling as PSD3/PSR finalise and technical standards under DORA mature. The strongest cybersecurity strategies are those which continue to adapt. That means testing defences against real-world attack scenarios, fixing weaknesses quickly, and making sure every team works from the same playbook.
Europe has a clear advantage: strong direction from regulators, and a rich ecosystem of supervisors, CSIRTs, and industry groups to learn from. That foundation gives FinTechs a head start. But in the end, innovation in finance runs on trust, and trust depends on resilience. Staying ahead of cyber threats requires expecting compromise, being ready to limit the damage, and being able to recover quickly.