DORA Compliance Software: What to Look For and Why It Matters

As a compliance professional working in payments or financial services, you've already been living with DORA for over a year. If you've landed on this article, you're probably looking for ways to make staying compliant simpler and more manageable. 

You may be:

• Operating across multiple jurisdictions, each with different deadlines, submission windows, and reporting formats to keep track of
• Tracking obligations manually, juggling spreadsheets, internal trackers, and disconnected tools with no single source of truth
• Struggling to keep up with constant updates across RTS, ITS, and NCA guidance that directly impact your compliance requirements
• Coordinating between compliance and IT on ICT risk management, incident management, and ICT third-party risk without clear ownership, structured workflows, or audit-ready records of what's been done
• Balancing DORA alongside MiCA, PSD3, GDPR, and other EU regulations with limited team capacity and competing priorities

If any of that sounds familiar, regulatory change management software can help. For payment firms and financial institutions, the right tool can streamline how you manage DORA compliance, especially over multiple jurisdictions. 

This guide covers what makes DORA compliance difficult to manage, what good software should do about it, and how Vixio helps compliance teams move from reactive firefighting to structured, confident oversight.

In this article:

• What you need to know about DORA
• The challenges of staying DORA compliant with manual processes 
• How DORA compliance software simplifies compliance management 
• Why compliance teams use Vixio for managing DORA compliance

Vixio gives compliance teams a more reliable way to monitor DORA developments, manage obligations across jurisdictions, and document every action with a full audit trail. If your current process is showing its limits, book a demo to see how Vixio can help.

What you need to know about DORA

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (Regulation EU 2022/2554) has applied to EU financial entities since January 17, 2025. It establishes a unified framework for managing ICT risk across the financial sector, built around five pillars: 

• ICT risk management framework
• Incident reporting
• Digital operational resilience testing
• Third-party risk management
• Information sharing

DORA applies to a wide range of entities, including banks, payment institutions, EMIs, investment firms, crypto asset service providers, and their critical ICT third-party service providers. If you're operating in the EU financial sector, it very likely applies to you.

Where DORA stands in 2026: moving from implementation to optimisation

DORA’s implementation period is over. Regulators are now evaluating whether firms can demonstrate they're complying with it accurately and consistently across every jurisdiction they operate in.

Year one reporting made clear how challenging full compliance can be in practice. When the European Supervisory Authorities (ESA) ran a 2024 dry-run exercise, only 6.5% of nearly 1,000 participating firms successfully passed all 116 data quality checks. Common failures included:

• Submitting in the wrong file format
• Leaving mandatory fields blank
• Mismanaging unique identifiers
• Omitting subcontractor chain detail

With the second annual Register of Information deadline falling in Q1 2026, national competent authorities have made clear they expect materially better submissions. The margin for error is getting smaller, which means the risk of getting it wrong is now higher. Compliance teams need to prove they’re compliant and feel confident that they can keep up with future changes, too. 

The challenges of staying DORA compliant with manual processes 

Without dedicated compliance software, DORA management typically falls to spreadsheets, email threads, and internal (and often informal) coordination between compliance and IT. 

When you handle compliance in-house without a change management platform, you’ll likely run into these problems: 

1. Managing DORA across multiple jurisdictions is operationally complex, with fragmented deadlines and requirements

Managing DORA in a single jurisdiction is hard enough. Once you scale across Europe, the complexity multiplies since different jurisdictions have unique deadlines, filing formats, and requirements. This makes it challenging for compliance teams to stay on top of deadlines and implement the correct requirements, heightening the potential risk for errors. 

Each National Competent Authority (NCA) sets its own collection timeline before forwarding to the ESAs by the end of March, and those timelines can shift year on year. 

Take the Register of Information submission as an example. In 2026:

• The Netherlands required submission to DNB or AFM by March 20
• Malta's window opened January 1 and closed March 21  
• Luxembourg required submission by March 1
• Ireland's window ran March 2 to March 31
• Germany's window ran March 9 to March 30

If you’re operating in multiple markets, it can be difficult to stay on top of these deadlines and requirements all at once, especially as they continue to evolve. 

File format requirements diverge, too. Germany currently accepts XBRL or Excel, while Ireland accepts XBRL only. Submitting in the wrong format can result in a compliance failure, with potential fines attached. 

Many compliance teams track this information manually across spreadsheets, local compliance contacts, and NCA websites in multiple languages. However, this can be a higher operational burden on the compliance team. And with so many moving pieces, it’s easier to miss deadlines or seemingly small secondary requirements you need to follow. 

2. Staying compliant with secondary technical standards is resource-intensive

Most compliance teams have a solid grasp of the core DORA regulation. The harder task is systematically tracking the 12+ batches of RTS, ITS, guidelines, and Q&As the ESAs have published alongside it. These are the standards that create most of the actual compliance obligations in practice, and they include: 

• How to classify ICT-related incidents for reporting
• How to structure the Register of Information
• What subcontracting chains must be documented, and to what depth
• How requirements interact with entity type and size

These standards continue to be published and updated, and teams that only track the core regulation are at risk of missing most of the practical compliance work that’s buried in the details. As NCA scrutiny intensifies in 2026, it’s the secondary standards that will determine whether a firm's submissions hold up.

For example, the EBA's Q&As alone have clarified dozens of highly specific points, including that certain fields assumed to be optional are mandatory and that non-branch financial entities must report "Not Applicable" rather than leaving fields blank. These are the kinds of details that don't appear in the core regulation but will determine whether a submission passes validation.

3. The compliance-to-IT handoff causes accountability breakdowns and lacks an audit trail in a complex regulatory environment 

DORA creates a unique challenge that most regulations don't: it spans two entirely different functions within the same organisation. Compliance defines what's required, and then IT has to implement it.

In most firms, the handoff between those teams happens over email, in meetings, or on Slack. Everything is in different places, which becomes a headache (and a compliance risk) to manage and track. The process is naturally prone to human error, including key team members missing messages, essential updates getting buried in threads, and even spreadsheets accidentally being deleted. 

These manual systems may seem to work until a regulator asks for evidence. Supervisors need to see a documented record showing when a requirement was identified, how it was assessed, and which actions were taken by specific team members. That’s difficult and time-consuming to prove when your team is stuck relying on disjointed processes. 

DORA's requirements span systems, vendors, contracts, and operational processes that sit squarely in IT's domain, including  ICT risk frameworks, resilience testing, third-party registers, and incident classification. Despite this, the compliance obligation, the deadline, and the enforcement risk belong to the compliance function. The challenge for compliance and IT to work together over multiple systems is difficult to tackle when nothing is in one place. 

Since these standards continue to be published and updated, teams that only track the core regulation are missing most of the practical compliance work. 

The challenge compounds further when you consider that DORA sits alongside a growing list of other EU regulations landing on the same team, including PSD3, AMLA, MiCA, NIS2, FIDA, and the AI Act. Each one brings its own secondary standards, deadlines, and monitoring requirements. Manual processes simply don't scale at the rate the regulatory calendar demands.

4. Finding reliable DORA intelligence takes time that most compliance teams don't have

Staying current with DORA means monitoring NCA websites, ESA publications, legislative databases, and enforcement updates across every jurisdiction you operate in. For teams covering multiple EU member states, that's a significant research burden that only grows with every new jurisdiction added to the footprint.

Understandably, some compliance professionals have tried using AI tools like ChatGPT to surface information quickly and reduce research time. However, the reliability problem is hard to ignore. A deadline published two weeks ago may not be in the training data; incorrect or incomplete data is a common occurrence, and there's no audit trail showing how a conclusion was reached. 

The result is that compliance teams end up spending a disproportionate amount of time gathering intelligence rather than acting on it. They’re bogged down verifying sources, cross-referencing NCA websites, and double-checking AI outputs instead of assessing impact and taking action. With a regulation where a missed deadline or incorrect interpretation carries enforcement consequences, that is not a sustainable position.

How DORA compliance software simplifies compliance management 

Instead of chasing updates across regulator websites, reconciling spreadsheets, and reconstructing timelines after the fact, compliance software that tracks DORA enables compliance teams to focus on assessing what matters and acting on it with a clear record of every decision made along the way.

Good DORA compliance software should:

• Consolidate monitoring across all relevant NCAs, ESAs, and legislative bodies into a single view through automated horizon scanning, so teams can easily find the right intelligence 
• Create a structured handoff between compliance and IT, with tasks assigned directly from regulatory updates and tracked through to completion
• Maintain a documented audit trail of every review, decision, and action, replacing the email threads and Slack messages that currently serve as the default record
• Cover the full EU regulatory environment so DORA isn’t managed in one tool while PSD3, MiCA, NIS2, and everything else stays fragmented elsewhere

Why compliance teams use Vixio for managing DORA compliance

Vixio is a specialist regulatory intelligence platform built for financial services compliance teams across payments, banking, and fintech. It combines AI-powered monitoring with experienced in-house regulatory analysts who review, interpret, and contextualise every development before it reaches the platform. That way, compliance teams spend less time chasing information and more time acting on it. 

Here’s what that looks like:

1. Get analyst-reviewed DORA intelligence that tells you exactly what to do and when

Most regulatory monitoring tools will share links to documents, but Vixio’s regulatory horizon scanning tool will provide the details that you actually need to know.

Every DORA development — whether it's a new RTS batch, an NCA submission guidance update, an enforcement action, or a clarification Q&A — is identified by Vixio as soon as it’s published. It’s then reviewed by our in-house regulatory analysts before it's published on the platform. This ensures that there’s no risk of hallucinations or unverified summaries, which means there’s no need to spend time manually cross-referencing the original source for accuracy. 

Every update is linked back to the primary source document, such as the NCA guidance, ESA publication, or legislative text that triggered it. That way, teams can validate conclusions and cite sources directly in internal reporting and regulatory submissions.

Updates are classified into three tiers so teams can prioritise immediately:

• Actionable: requires assessment and a defined response; this may be a new obligation, a confirmed deadline, a rule change that affects operations
• Indicative: signals a development that could change obligations in the near future; these are worth monitoring and factoring into planning assumptions
• Informative: provides regulatory context without creating an immediate task

This means teams are never spending time on updates that don't require action, and they’re never at risk of missing the ones that do.

Beyond daily monitoring, Vixio's forward-looking Country Outlook reports provide deeper strategic context to help teams anticipate what's coming and plan ahead proactively. This can reduce last-minute scrambling down the road, giving your team more time to adapt to likely changes. 

2. Give compliance and IT a shared system for handing off DORA obligations and tracking them to completion

Many firms struggle with the hand-off process from compliance teams to IT, and Vixio Workspace directly addresses this problem.

When a DORA development requires action, Workspace lets compliance teams create a task directly from the regulatory update. You can assign that task to the right person — whether that's in compliance, IT, or legal — with full context attached. The person receiving the task can see exactly what triggered it, what's required, and when it's due.

Progress is tracked in one central place. Every review, decision, and action is documented in a built-in audit trail. When a regulator asks for evidence of how an ICT risk was identified, assessed, and mitigated, the answer isn't a folder of emails. Instead, you’ll have a structured record showing what happened, who was responsible, when it was completed, and which regulatory development triggered it.

For firms that have struggled with the compliance-to-IT handoff under DORA, this is a significant workflow improvement. The regulatory obligation and the operational action are connected from the start instead of being reconstructed after the fact.

3. DORA compliance managed alongside every other EU regulation your team is responsible for

Vixio isn’t just about tracking DORA: that’s just one piece of the puzzle. Vixio aims to track all the other EU and global regulations that may impact your business, too.  

DORA, PSD3, AMLA, MiCA, NIS2, FIDA, and the AI Act are all covered on the same platform, with the same analyst-reviewed intelligence, three-tier classification, Workspace workflow, and audit trail. As the EU regulatory calendar grows, Vixio's coverage grows with it.

For compliance teams managing multiple regulations across multiple jurisdictions, this means you don’t have to:

• Build a separate monitoring process for each new regulation
• Switch between tools or reconcile outputs from different systems
• Lose context every time a new piece of EU legislation lands

Having everything in a single automated platform means compliance teams aren’t reconciling outputs from different tools, rebuilding context when a new regulation lands, or managing fragmented audit trails across multiple systems. And because Vixio is browser-based with no IT implementation required, teams can get started quickly without an internal project or procurement delay.

Vixio: trusted by financial services compliance teams for 20 years

Vixio is trusted by 500+ organisations across payments, gambling, banking, and fintech to manage regulatory change at the speed the market demands.

• Flywire uses Vixio to anticipate regulatory changes across multiple jurisdictions, giving its compliance team a first-mover advantage when bringing products to market.
• SumUp relies on Vixio to manage licensing and compliance obligations across 36 markets, with their Senior Compliance Manager describing the platform as the only tool that translates regulatory requirements into something digestible and actionable.
•  Trust Payments, licensed by both the FCA and the MFSA, uses Vixio to cut through the volume of regulatory updates and identify what requires immediate action. 

“With compliance, you're always having to determine what’s very urgent and what you need to read immediately.  Vixio sends us great summaries so we can decide straight away whether it's something that requires our immediate attention to read now or later.” —-Comfort Balogun, Senior Compliance Analyst, Trust Payments

Optimise your DORA compliance management with  Vixio

Vixio gives financial services compliance teams a more structured way to manage DORA's complexity. Vixio’s platform combines analyst-reviewed regulatory intelligence, intelligent prioritisation across NCAs and ESAs, a clear compliance-to-IT workflow, and a full audit trail in a single platform that covers DORA alongside every other EU regulation your team is responsible for.

Book a demo to see how Vixio can help your team stay ahead of DORA and act on change with confidence.

Frequently asked questions (FAQ): DORA compliance software

What does DORA compliance software actually do?

DORA compliance software offers a few essential functions:

• Monitors regulatory developments across the EU's national competent authorities and the European Supervisory Authorities in real-time
• Classifies updates by urgency and relevance
• Gives compliance teams a structured way to assess, assign, and document their response across the full obligation lifecycle

The best DORA compliance platforms also manage the workflow between compliance and ICT systems teams. Vixio's Workspace, for example, allows you to create tasks from regulatory updates, track progress, and maintain a documented, audit-ready trail so firms can demonstrate their compliance process to regulators when required.

Is DORA compliance software only useful for multi-jurisdictional businesses?

No, DORA compliance software can be useful even if your business falls within a single jurisdiction. Even firms in a single EU member state face the challenge of tracking 12+ batches of secondary technical standards, managing the handoff between compliance and IT, and keeping pace with ongoing NCA guidance and Q&As. They also face the same risks of missed secondary standards, documentation gaps, and unverified AI output.

The difference is that multi-jurisdictional firms face those risks multiplied by every additional country in their footprint, making DORA compliance software even more critical.

How is DORA compliance software different from using a generic AI tool?

General-purpose AI tools fall short in four specific ways:

• They're trained on data with a cutoff date, which means a submission guidance update published two weeks ago may simply not be in the training data
• They lack the contextual layer that makes regulatory intelligence actionable: whether a change applies to your specific entity type, what it requires you to do, and by when
• They produce no audit-ready trail
• They hallucinate, frequently generating plausible-sounding but incorrect information, and compliance professionals have no way to know when it's happened without manually verifying each output

Vixio's content is validated by our in-house regulatory analysts before it reaches the platform. Every update is linked to the primary source document, so you can easily review all key requirements, and the full lifecycle of how your team responded to each development is documented in Workspace for full auditability.

What's the best DORA compliance software?

The right platform depends on your firm's size, jurisdictional footprint, and regulatory scope. At minimum, it should cover the full secondary standards picture, support real-time deadline tracking across multiple NCAs, give compliance and IT a shared workflow with documented handoffs, and extend beyond DORA to the broader EU regulatory environment.

Vixio's automated intelligence platform does all of this and combines it with analyst-reviewed intelligence so your team always knows what a development means and how to streamline its implementation.

What is TLPT under DORA, and does it apply to my firm?

Threat-led penetration testing (TLPT) is one of DORA's advanced digital operational resilience testing requirements. It involves simulating real-world cyber threats and cyberattacks against your live production systems to identify vulnerabilities before they can cause operational disruptions. Unlike standard testing, TLPT must be conducted by qualified external testers and follows a specific methodology set out in the relevant RTS.

TLPT does not apply to all firms. It is targeted at significant financial institutions identified by their NCA, based on factors including size, systemic importance, and ICT risk profile. If your firm is in scope, the requirements are substantial, and incident response planning forms a critical part of the overall programme. Vixio monitors TLPT-related developments across all NCAs so your team is never caught off guard by a designation or a change in testing requirements.