In FinServ, Compliance Can’t Replace Capability

Now that the compliance deadlines have passed, SOC teams in Financial Services are being asked more challenging questions about their team’s real capability.

FCA/PRA operational resilience requirements are in force. DORA is live. For the past two years, the pressure was clear: get your people trained, get the documentation in order, hit the deadline.

That phase is over.

Now regulators, auditors, and boards are asking an even harder question: is the team actually capable beyond on-paper compliance?

Training completion isn’t a proxy for understanding

There's a pattern that plays out across financial services security teams. Platforms fill up with modules. Staff work through them, the completion rates climb. The reports go to leadership and the box gets ticked. The real test isn't whether your team completed the programme. It's whether they're still using it six months later, and whether they'd choose to if it wasn't mandatory.

With mandatory, enforced completion it can be tempting to say the job’s done. But completion data doesn't tell you whether they can handle a real incident or whether a junior analyst will escalate correctly under pressure. It can’t predict whether your senior analysts are quietly spending half their week correcting mistakes that training was supposed to prevent. We've seen this play out directly. At Huntress, inconsistent foundational knowledge was leading to slower incident resolution and increased escalations. Senior specialists were absorbing the cost of those gaps. Onboarding was taking around 90 days and costing over $13,000 per hire. The completion data looked fine. The operational reality told a different story.

Completion doesn’t accurate measure understanding, and confusing the two has real business consequences. There's also a difference between a platform your team is told to use and one they actually want to use. When training feels mandated rather than chosen, it gets tolerated but never embedded. And it gets abandoned once compliance deadlines pass.

What does verifiable competence look like?

Forward-thinking security teams know that checking boxes doesn't improve outcomes. One of the strongest signal we see isn't in completion dashboards. It's when analysts start recommending the platform to colleagues who haven't been asked to use it yet. Practitioner-led adoption is the difference between a training culture that compounds over time and one that quietly collapses after the deadline passes.

Forward-thinking teams are getting ahead of regulators by focusing on evidence of operational readiness.

They’re focused on:

• Hands-on, scenario-based practice mapped to the real workflows analysts follow every day. They know their teams need more than a generic content library
• Reporting that shows who can handle what independently, beyond completion alone
• Measurable progression tied to actual SOC metrics

It’s this granular, capability-focused framing of readiness that holds up to scrutiny, and helps the wider business actually understand where the team stands, and what resources it requires. Crucially, it also gives analysts themselves a clear picture of their own growth. That understanding drives the kind of voluntary, self-directed engagement that no mandatory program can manufacture.

What comes after compliance?

Now that compliance deadlines have passed, security leaders in FinServ are being prompted to really show what readiness means.

Working with teams in over 1,000 organizations, we know that the teams that shift from passive content consumption to active, immersive skills development respond faster, cost less to run, and have an easier time providing evidence when auditors come back around.

We know that the closer to reality their practice experience and training is, the better they’ll be able to apply those experiences when a real incident occurs. And the better their managers will be at understanding where more focus and work is needed to be meaningfully prepared.

The deadline was the starting gun. What happens next is where the real work — and the real differentiation begins.

The question worth asking now

The stakes in FinServe are too high for complacency. The teams pulling ahead aren't stopping to celebrate compliance. They're asking:

• When an incident hits at 2am, which of our analysts can handle it without calling for backup?
• If a regulator asked us to demonstrate operational readiness tomorrow, what would we actually show them?
• How much of our senior analysts' time is still going toward oversight and correction? What does that tell us about training effectiveness?
• We know who completed the modules. Do we know who's ready?

If your current training approach was built to get you to the deadline, it may not be built for what comes after it.

Readiness is a different standard. Getting there starts with being honest about whether you're meeting it.

If you want to see how that looks in practice, book a call with our team.