Debate: Digital finance: Digital Operational Resilience Act  - Digital Finance: Amending Directive regarding Digital Operational Resilience requirements
Date: WEDNESDAY, 9 NOVEMBER 2022
Speaker: Billy Kelleher
Country: Denmark
Language: EN

The financial sector has always been an attractive target for cyberattacks, given the potential lucrative gains, and cybersecurity, as all security has been a long—standing priority for the sector. However, the legal requirements and financial entities across the EU differed, depending on the services they provided or where they were located. There was just a patchwork of rules and regulation. Moreover, as the sector became more digitised, the interconnectivity with, and the reliance on, the tech sector has increased the chances and the risks of a cyberattack.  DORA seeks to address both of these issues and to create a robust and harmonised security framework across the entire EU financial sector. I suppose that due to geopolitical issues, the importance of this framework has unfortunately been thrown into the limelight and become more pertinent since Russia has invaded Ukraine. It does indicate the great risk that we are at, if we have a very aggressive neighbour like Russia that is willing to attack people, destroy electrical infrastructure, to make people cold, to use food as a weapon and to weaponize energy, then be in no doubt that Russia would be willing and very capable of attacking our fundamentals in terms of financial services. We have to be very conscious of that.  I approached this file with three principles. First and foremost, proportionality, then future—proofing and maintaining and encouraging the competitiveness of the EU’s financial services and tech sectors. I think we achieved that in the final text. DORA takes an ambitious approach to third—party ICT providers, such as cloud computing providers to the financial sector, in that it introduces an oversight framework.  It was very important to ensure this oversight framework had robust and just governance, and that we recognise that such oversight is novel and there will be many lessons to be learned from us and expertise to be developed in the period ahead. Therefore, despite some initial reluctance from Member States, the resulting governance structures ensures that all European financial supervisors are involved and that they don’t start working in silos again at Member State level. In other words, there’s a cross—fertilisation of ideas.  I am proud to say that, as co—legislators, we avoided imposing location requirements. This was a quite a contentious issue early on. ICT providers building a ‘fortress Europe’ and making it unattractive for global companies to do business with our European companies will not strengthen the security of EU markets. I would urge the Commission to avoid undermining the approach taken to third—country ICT providers in DORA, for example, and in the upcoming EU Cloud Certification scheme.  The agreement was voted in ECON on 20 July 2022, with 41 in favour, zero against and six abstentions. I have to say that I am extremely disappointed with the ID Group, who have tabled a number of amendments – and I don’t mean to make an overtly political point on this, but time and again we see people on the left and on the very right tabling amendments on an agreed compromise text. I wouldn’t mind if they were involved in the process, but they never engaged in it. My office was as open with every political grouping, and not once was there any engagement from the ID Group. So from that perspective, I am deeply, deeply disappointed that we now see amendments being tabled when there was an opportunity to engage in the process whereby we actually agreed a text between most political groupings. Therefore, I would urge the House to vote against the amendments and stick to the agreed text.  Finally, I would like to thank Mikuláš Peksa, the rapporteur for the DORA amending directive, and my Renew colleague Bart Groothuis, the rapporteur for the NIS Directive, for their cooperation and alignment during the legislative process. Finally, I would like to thank all the shadow rapporteurs, including Frances Fitzgerald, who is also a colleague of mine, and all the others who engaged in the process. I will be summing up later on so will be able to thank you on an individual basis then as well.