FFIEC IT
The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council's IT examination guidance. Examiners use it as the basis for IT exams of US banks, credit unions, and supervised entities.
Mapped, monitored, and audit-ready.
Every FFIEC IT control has a place in Talarity — with cross-mapping, automated evidence, and continuous validation.
Talarity's pre-built control library covering FFIEC IT, with linked evidence, owners, and testing schedules.
Answer once, prove everywhere. Talarity's mapping engine reuses your evidence across every framework you run.
- Cybersecurity Assessment Tool (CAT) responses with maturity progression
- Wire and ACH controls and segregation of duties
- Vendor management documentation per FIL-44-2008
- Business continuity and disaster recovery test results
- Information security risk assessments
Your FFIEC IT dashboard
Every completed FFIEC IT assessment updates this automatically — where you stand now, how that has changed, and which areas need work.
What gets easier with Talarity.
Examiners ask for evidence-gated maturity scoring — and your CAT spreadsheet is just numbers, no proof behind them.
Talarity ties every CAT maturity statement to the underlying evidence. Examiners click any score, see the artifacts that justify it.
FFIEC vendor management expectations exceed what most generic TPRM tools provide.
Vendor Management ships with FFIEC-aligned due diligence templates, FIL-44-2008 risk classifications, and ongoing monitoring requirements baked in.
Business continuity test results live in a binder that gets dusted off annually for the examiner.
BCP/DR testing is workflow-driven. Test plans, results, and after-action reports are timestamped and discoverable on demand.
Examination findings linger across cycles because remediation is tracked in email threads.
Findings are first-class objects with owners, due dates, and risk impact. When the next examiner arrives, prior findings are closed with proof.
FFIEC IT — common questions
- What is the FFIEC IT Examination Handbook?
- It is the set of booklets examiners use when assessing technology risk at supervised financial institutions and their service providers, covering areas such as information security, business continuity management, architecture and operations, development and acquisition, outsourcing, and audit. It is examination guidance rather than a certification standard — the questions in it are the questions you will be asked.
- Which regulators use it?
- The FFIEC is an interagency body, and its members include the OCC, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the NCUA and the CFPB, with state regulators represented. Your primary federal regulator depends on your charter, but the handbook provides common ground across them, which is why it is a sensible baseline even when a specific agency issues its own supplemental guidance.
- Is the Cybersecurity Assessment Tool still in use?
- The FFIEC has sunset the Cybersecurity Assessment Tool and pointed institutions toward other standardised assessment approaches, including frameworks such as NIST CSF and sector tools. Institutions that built their programme around the CAT need a documented transition rather than an abrupt stop, since examiners will still expect a consistent, repeatable measure of cyber maturity over time.
- How does FFIEC treat third-party and vendor risk?
- Oversight of third parties is examined directly, and the expectation scales with criticality: due diligence before engagement, contract provisions covering security and resilience, ongoing monitoring proportionate to risk, and contingency planning for the failure of a critical provider. Interagency guidance on third-party relationships sets the expectations, and a complete, tiered vendor inventory is the foundation examiners work from.
Working with FFIEC IT
Step-by-step walkthroughs from the Talarity library.
- Compliance·8 min readPackage your audit evidence once — for the auditor, regulator, or customerAn auditor asks for your evidence and it's scattered across framework reports, vendor attestations, policy sign-offs, and resilience tests. Evidence Distribution Packages assemble the signed artifacts you already produced into one immutable package, then hand it to each audience as a redacted, watermarked, time-limited copy — with a record of who received what.
- Compliance·7 min readFramework readiness to audit package — the whole cycle on one screenAudit prep usually means a spreadsheet scramble — chasing evidence, tracking which controls are covered, re-checking what's expired. Talarity keeps a live readiness picture for every framework (SOC 2, ISO 27001, CIS, and more) — coverage, gaps, evidence freshness — and packages it into an auditor-ready export in one click.
- Compliance·7 min readContinuous compliance is a tooling problem, not a process problemEvery compliance program eventually decides it needs to be 'continuous.' Most then try to fix it with process. The actual fix is upstream — in the tools that make evidence freshness a default, not a sprint.
- Compliance·14 min readThe evidence nobody can deleteA legal hold is a promise that a specific piece of evidence will still exist months from now, made to people who will check. This is where you place one in Talarity, what the record has to survive, and — just as important — what a hold does not freeze.
Ready to ship FFIEC IT?
Start a 7-day trial and run this framework end-to-end on your own evidence — then buy online in-app when you're ready.