Finance and insurance
Recurring issues
Protection and sovereignty of sensitive data
Customer information, card numbers, and actuarial reports must remain encrypted and geographically routed; yet, many institutions use clouds / DCs outside BCEAO jurisdiction, exposing critical data to conflicting regulations.
Multi-standard compliance and stringent audits
Each year, BCEAO-GDPR audits, PCI-DSS attestations, and CIMA reviews follow one another; incompletely maintained technical documentation and scattered configurations make preparation stressful and time-consuming.
Sophisticated attacks and internal fraud
Ransomware with double extortion and banking trojans are targeting SWIFT gateways; in parallel, insiders are taking advantage of a lack of segmentation to exfiltrate sensitive data or manipulate transactions.
Availability of e-services and mobile channels
Cross-border network failures, overloading of online banking portals and open banking APIs are causing latency issues; a few minutes of unavailability is enough to trigger an escalation on social media and SLA penalties.
Business continuity plans (BCP/DRP) under-tested
Much disaster recovery remains theoretical; real-time database replication is not always consistent, failovers are executed manually, and drills do not cover third-party dependencies (SWIFT switches, Mobile Money gateways).
SATLX IT SERVICES Approach
NIST CSF Maturity Assessment & Regulatory Gap Analysis
Critical asset mapping (PCI data, SWIFT, privacy), BCEAO/GDPR/PCI-DSS/ISO 27001 compliance scoring.
Prioritised roadmap: quick wins, CAPEX/OPEX investments, risk indicators.
Zero-Trust Architecture and granular segmentation
Fortinet Micro-segmentation: isolation of front-office, middle-office, SWIFT, POS, IARD; dynamic policies based on identity and context.
Proxy SASE and MFA everywhere (agents, suppliers, admins) to block lateral movement and reduce the attack surface.
Active-Active dual datacentre & DR tested
Real-time replication (SQL Always On / Oracle DataGuard) between on-premises DCs and regional cloud, RPO ≈ 0, RTO < 15 min.
Automation of switches (Ansible/Terraform), semi-annual exercises including ransomware and SWIFT failure scenarios.
24/7 SOC & Managed XDR
Wazuh platform + specific financial threat intelligence; SWIFT CSP, Core Banking, ATM, Mobile API log correlation.
Playbooks SOAR for ransomware neutralisation, blocking compromised cards, regulator notification in < 72 hours.
End-to-end encryption and access control
HSMs or TPM modules for root keys, AES-256 / TLS 1.3 encryption, PCI tokenisation.
Bastion PAM auditing every administration command on critical databases and firewalls.
Supervision SLA & Customer Experience
OBKIO/PRTG probes for e-banking response times, API availability, Mobile Money latency.
Power BI Dashboards for Management: SLA, Fraud Blocked, Real-time Compliance Level.
Measurable benefits
- Significant reduction in residual cyber risk and major incidents.
- Significant increase in the availability of online portals and mobile channels, even during periods of peak traffic.
- Marked reduction in non-conformities.
- Significant reduction in costs related to service penalties and audits thanks to automated documentation and truly tested disaster recovery plans.
- Tangible improvement in customer confidence, brand reputation, and satisfaction metrics.
With SATLX IT SERVICES, your banking and insurance activities gain a zero-compromise infrastructure: secure, compliant, and continuously available across all your African sites.
Our areas of expertise
