GLBA & Data Security Compliance for FinTech Companies

It depends on your activities and structure, and we assess that before building anything. The FTC Safeguards Rule (16 CFR Part 314) implements the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act for non-bank financial institutions under FTC jurisdiction.

A fintech engaged in a financial activity, such as lending, payments or money transmission, financial-data aggregation, wealth or investing, or deposit-adjacent services, is generally treated as a financial institution.

If you are non-bank and not regulated by the SEC, the Safeguards Rule generally applies. If you are SEC-regulated or operate as a bank, a different regulator governs you.

Fintechs that only support banks are generally not regulated directly by GLBA as service providers; their obligations flow by contract under the banking agencies' guidelines.

We map your specific activities during onboarding and document why and how the rule applies, rather than assuming it does.

Two things typically apply at once. First, if you handle customer financial information for a chartered bank, the bank is required under the banking agencies' guidelines to oversee you as a service provider, and those obligations reach you by contract.

Second, your bank-partner and processor contracts usually flow down specific security controls, evidence, and breach-notification timelines you must meet, and those obligations are enforced contractually whether or not a regulator ever contacts you directly.

We inventory those relationships, map the flowed-down requirements alongside any FTC Safeguards obligations you carry directly, and build one program that answers your bank partners' reviews and attestations from controls that are already operating.

For a fintech, the application and its APIs are where customer financial data lives and moves, so they are central to every obligation you carry.

The Safeguards Rule expects covered institutions that build their own software to adopt secure development practices, and bank partners look for the same.

That means authentication and authorization enforced consistently across your APIs, encryption in transit and at rest, secrets managed rather than embedded in code, hardened cloud configuration, dependency and vulnerability management in your pipeline, and logging of access to customer data.

We assess your SDLC, API, and cloud posture and map the gaps to the controls each obligation expects, so security in the product itself becomes part of the compliance evidence rather than an afterthought.

The Safeguards Rule itself does not carry a first-violation civil penalty. The FTC has told Congress it lacks civil penalty authority for initial Safeguards Rule violations.

Instead, the FTC investigates and typically resolves cases with consent orders that last for years and require a comprehensive security program, independent assessments, and annual compliance certifications.

Violating such an order can bring civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation (16 CFR 1.98, as adjusted in January 2025 and unchanged for 2026).

Where the rule applies, state attorneys general can also bring parallel actions under state consumer protection and data-security laws.

For a fintech, the contractual exposure is often just as serious: a bank partner can suspend or terminate the relationship if you cannot meet its security requirements, and a failed security review can stall funding, partnerships, and enterprise deals.

Beyond that, a breach involving customer account data or bank credentials can trigger notification duties, direct financial loss, and lasting reputational damage.

The compliance program exists to prevent the breach and to keep your partnerships intact, not just to satisfy a regulator.

No. Major cloud providers operate under a shared-responsibility model: they secure the underlying infrastructure, but the security of your application, your data, your access controls, your API authentication, and your configuration is your responsibility.

Compliant infrastructure is a foundation, not a finished program.

You are still accountable for your written program, your access controls and MFA, your encryption and key management, your risk assessment, your incident response plan, your logging, and your oversight of every service provider that touches customer data, including the cloud provider itself.

We build the program around your full environment and document that the cloud controls you rely on are actually configured and monitored.

They can. If you hold money-transmitter licenses, many states attach data-security, examination, and breach-notification requirements to those licenses, and they vary from state to state and sit on top of any federal obligation.

The practical result is that a fintech operating across multiple states may answer to the FTC Safeguards Rule, its bank partners, and several states' data-security expectations at the same time.

We build one control set and one evidence trail designed to satisfy these overlapping requirements together, so the same work supports a state examination rather than being rebuilt for each.

Your licensing and legal counsel address the state-specific legal interpretation.

We start with a coverage assessment that determines which rules actually reach your activities and structure, because for a fintech that answer is not automatic.

From there we deliver the program end to end: a gap analysis, a written risk assessment, the written information security program and supporting policies, and implementation of the technical controls, including MFA, encryption, access controls, logging, secure development and API security, and endpoint and email security.

We map bank-partner requirements against the same control set. We then manage the program on an ongoing basis so it stays current as your product, your partners, and the rules change. We serve commercial clients across Texas, Tennessee, and the United States.