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Financial Services → PCI DSS and SOC 2 Compliance
Ensuring PCI DSS and SOC 2 compliance in financial services web hosting
Financial institutions live and die by trust. Customers expect their data, their transactions, and their wealth to be protected at all times.
Hosting environments are part of that equation, but for many financial leaders, compliance in hosting feels like a technical maze. Let’s clear that up.
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Key takeaways
- PCI DSS ensures secure handling of cardholder data, while SOC 2 ensures service providers safeguard systems and information.
- PCI DSS is mandatory for organizations that process, store, or transmit credit card data. SOC 2 is voluntary but often essential for vendor trust.
- Hosting providers play a direct role in compliance by offering secure infrastructure, encryption, monitoring, and audit-ready environments.
- Financial institutions should prioritize vendor due diligence, regular audits, encryption practices, and incident response plans.
- Choosing the right hosting partner reduces risk, improves resilience, and strengthens compliance posture.
What is PCI DSS? Why it matters for banks and fintechs
PCI DSS is the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, a global framework created by major credit card brands to ensure that organizations securely handle payment card data.
For banks, credit unions, and fintechs, PCI DSS is not optional. If your systems store, process, or transmit credit card information, compliance is required. The framework defines strict requirements across areas such as firewalls, encryption, access controls, and ongoing monitoring.
In practice, PCI DSS compliance means every server where payment data flows must be hardened against threats. Hosting providers offering PCI DSS–ready infrastructure handle core security requirements like network segmentation, intrusion detection, and patch management.
For a financial leader, this means your technical team can focus on building secure payment workflows rather than reinventing compliance at the infrastructure layer.
What is SOC 2? Why it’s critical for vendor trust
SOC 2 is a Service Organization Control 2 report, developed by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA). It verifies whether a service provider securely manages data based on five Trust Services Criteria:
- Security
- Availability
- Processing integrity
- Confidentiality
- Privacy
SOC 2 covers broad operational controls. For financial organizations, this matters because every vendor—whether a cloud host, CRM, or SaaS platform—can become a weak link. SOC 2 compliance provides assurance that your hosting provider has documented, tested, and audited processes for protecting your systems and your customers’ sensitive data.
What’s the difference between PCI DSS and SOC 2?
PCI DSS and SOC 2 overlap in areas like security, monitoring, and access controls, but they serve different purposes. PCI DSS is a mandatory, prescriptive standard for handling cardholder data. SOC 2 is a voluntary, attestation-based audit that demonstrates broader organizational trustworthiness.
| Aspect | PCI DSS | SOC 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Protect cardholder data | Validate trust in data management practices |
| Scope | Payment processing environments | Broader IT systems and vendor operations |
| Mandatory? | Yes, if handling card data | No, but often required in vendor contracts |
| Framework type | Prescriptive technical requirements | Attestation against Trust Services Criteria |
| Audience | Card brands, acquirers, regulators | Customers, partners, vendors |
Who needs PCI DSS and/or SOC 2 compliance?
Any financial services organization that handles payment card data needs PCI DSS compliance. This includes banks issuing credit cards, fintechs enabling digital wallets, or insurance providers accepting premium payments online.
SOC 2 is broader. Any vendor handling sensitive financial data, or any financial institution outsourcing critical services, benefits from SOC 2 attestation. Even if it isn’t legally mandated, financial services leaders often require SOC 2 in vendor onboarding to demonstrate trustworthiness and protect against third-party risk.
Best practices for achieving and maintaining compliance in financial services
Meeting PCI DSS and SOC 2 requirements isn’t a one-time project. It requires structured processes, the right hosting environment, and ongoing vigilance.
1. Vendor due diligence
In general, vendor due diligence is the process of evaluating third-party partners to ensure they meet your organization’s security, financial, and operational standards. For financial institutions, this is critical because regulators often hold you responsible for risks created by your vendors.
Due diligence involves reviewing contracts, certifications, policies, and ongoing performance.
In hosting, due diligence means digging into how a provider manages data centers, networking, and security operations.
- Ask for PCI DSS Attestation of Compliance (AOC) and a current SOC 2 report.
- Evaluate the hosting provider’s track record: uptime guarantees, whether they employ 24/7 monitoring, etc.
Financial institutions should insist on transparency around data center locations, physical security, and redundancy measures, since these directly impact compliance and resilience.
2. Regular audits and monitoring
At the organizational level, regular audits and monitoring are how companies validate that their policies and controls are working.
- Audits can be internal reviews or independent third-party assessments.
- Monitoring is the continuous process of watching systems, logs, and activities for signs of weaknesses or breaches.
Together, they prevent compliance from becoming a one-time event and instead turn it into a living discipline.
When it comes to hosting, audits and monitoring should extend into your infrastructure provider’s responsibilities.
- Hosting partners should supply regular reports on patch management, vulnerability scans, and intrusion detection.
- Financial institutions should ensure log data from hosted environments integrates with their SIEM (security information and event management) tools for centralized oversight.
Ideally, hosting contracts should include real-time alerting on suspicious activities. This makes audits less painful and gives regulators confidence in your monitoring posture.
3. Encryption and secure key management
Across industries, encryption is the bedrock of protecting sensitive data. It ensures that even if attackers gain access to files or communications, the information is unreadable without the proper keys.
Secure key management is the other half of the equation, involving how encryption keys are generated, stored, rotated, and revoked. Weak key management undermines even the strongest encryption.
In hosting environments, encryption should cover both data in transit (such as TLS/SSL for web traffic) and data at rest (databases, storage volumes, backups). Hosting providers that specialize in financial services typically offer built-in disk-level encryption, encrypted backups, and managed SSL/TLS.
But encryption is only as strong as the key management system. Look for providers that use Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) or secure vault systems for key storage. Financial leaders should verify whether the hosting provider’s team or your internal team controls the keys, since this determines who holds ultimate responsibility under compliance audits.
“Think of encryption as the vault door — but without proper key management, you’re leaving the keys under the mat.” – Anthony Anachuna, Business Development Representative
4. Incident response protocols
Incident response, at a high level, is the structured process organizations use to detect, contain, and recover from security breaches or system failures.
For regulated industries like finance, regulators often require documented incident response plans and periodic testing. A strong protocol reduces downtime, limits data loss, and helps prove due diligence during post-incident investigations.
In hosting, incident response is about what happens when something goes wrong in your servers or data centers.
Hosting providers should have a 24/7 security operations center (SOC) that can identify anomalies, escalate alerts, and execute recovery actions. Financial institutions should ensure their own incident response plan is aligned with their hosting provider’s escalation paths. Ask questions like:
- Who notifies us if a server is compromised?
- How fast are incidents escalated?
- How are forensic logs preserved for investigations?
Hosting vendors with tested response playbooks, combined with your internal teams, create a joint defense that auditors and regulators expect.
Financial services compliance FAQ
Next steps for ensuring PCI DSS and SOC 2 compliance
Compliance is more than a checkbox. It’s a safeguard for customer trust, a shield against breaches, and a competitive edge in vendor relationships. Financial institutions that invest in compliance-ready hosting strengthen resilience and reduce regulatory risk.
Your next step should be a review of your hosting environment and vendor contracts. Confirm whether your current provider holds valid PCI DSS and SOC 2 certifications, and whether their controls map to your internal compliance requirements.
When you’re ready to upgrade your hosting, Liquid Web can help. Our financial services hosting offers infrastructure built for compliance, with advanced encryption, managed firewalls, DDoS protection, and 24/7 monitoring. Our hosting solutions help financial institutions align with PCI DSS and SOC 2, while maintaining the performance and uptime needed for real-time transactions.
Click through below or start a chat now with a financial services hosting expert to learn more.