Certificate management: challenges & opportunities for the financial industry
Financial institutions must fix certificate risks. Automation and unified CLM reduce outages, strengthen security, and simplify compliance.
Thanks to both stricter regulatory requirements and the rising frequency of data breaches, online security is now more of a priority for financial institutions than ever before. Secure transactions, identity authentication, and regulatory compliance are all vital objectives in the modern financial industry. And at the heart of all these objectives is certificate management, a critical process that governs the issuance, renewal, and revocation of digital certificates.
Tightening regulations and the ever-growing threat of cyberattacks have underscored the need for efficient certificate management in the financial industry. Unfortunately, many organizations have already experienced certificate-related outages and breaches that disrupt their services and harm customer trust. Take the well-known case of HSBC, for example, where the bank experienced a widespread outage of a critical payment processing system due to an expired digital certificate.
With manual certificate lifecycle management (CLM) processes still prevalent in many organizations, challenges such as delayed renewals, tracking errors, and fragmented management systems create substantial risks. To help financial institutions address these risks, let's take an in-depth look at the key challenges in certificate management and the opportunities to address them with automation.
Challenges in certificate management for financial institutions
Financial institutions face a complex landscape when it comes to managing digital certificates. From the ever-growing number of digital assets they have to manage to the increasing regulatory pressures, there are a lot of certificate lifecycle management (CLM) challenges that organizations must overcome. Here are several of the top challenges facing financial institutions today:
Managing a complex and expanding digital certificate landscape
In today’s financial ecosystem, institutions must secure an ever-growing number of digital assets. From ATMs and mobile banking apps to cloud services and third-party integrations, there is now a wide range of platforms where digital certificates need to be issued, tracked, and renewed.
The process becomes even more complex when certificate management spans multiple environments (such as Windows, Linux, Kubernetes, and Azure). Institutions are increasingly running workloads across diverse environments, all of which require strong, consistent certificate-based authentication. This shift requires a certificate lifecycle management solution that can integrate seamlessly across these platforms. Without centralized visibility and automation, tracking certificate status in such a fragmented ecosystem can lead to errors, missed renewals, and potential service disruptions.
This highlights the need for a CA-agnostic, cloud-native CLM solution that is capable of discovering, managing, and renewing certificates across all environments and certificate types, whether public or private, from a single pane of glass.
Certificate expirations and service outages
Expired SSL certificates present significant risks to financial institutions. From rendering ATMs inoperable to disrupting online transactions to potentially exposing serious security vulnerabilities, even a single missed renewal can cause widespread operational and reputational damage. In fact, according to a survey by the Ponemon Institute, unplanned outages caused by expired certificates can cost organizations an average of $15 million per outage.
For the many organizations that still rely on spreadsheets and manual tracking to keep up with certificate renewals, the chance of oversight is high. This outdated approach significantly increases the likelihood of a data breach, especially as certificate volumes grow and lifespans eventually shorten to 47 days.
One organization that faced this challenge was Mutuelle Viasanté, a healthcare mutual group. They were managing certificates manually and found it increasingly difficult to prevent lapses. By adopting Sectigo’s automated CLM solution, they eliminated the risk of expired certificates and achieved centralized visibility across their digital infrastructure. Read the full case study to learn how they transformed their approach.
Navigating compliance and regulatory pressures
Regulations such as PCI DSS, GDPR, and PSD2 impose strict requirements on financial institutions regarding data security and certificate management. These regulations mandate rigorous auditing, encryption standards, and real-time visibility into certificate statuses. Each of these frameworks outlines specific expectations, from issuance to renewal and revocation, and requires proof that certificates are being actively monitored and maintained.
To avoid fines and maintain customer trust, financial institutions must bear the burden of ensuring that their certificate management practices are aligned with regulatory standards and tracked in real time. This includes implementing robust controls for certificate auditing, adopting strong encryption practices, and having centralized visibility to demonstrate compliance during regulatory audits. A single lapse, such as an expired or misconfigured certificate, could result not only in service disruptions but also in non-compliance penalties.
Lack of visibility and centralized control over certificates
Financial institutions using multiple Certificate Authorities (CAs) struggle with fragmented certificate management. Without centralized visibility, financial institutions risk exposure to security threats and inefficiencies, including blind spots where certificates may expire unnoticed or be mismanaged.
Consider a multinational bank managing thousands of digital certificates across several regions. Without a unified management system, tracking expirations and renewals becomes a practically impossible task. This complexity is only magnified when certificates span various environments, teams, and geographies, making it difficult to maintain consistent policies or ensure compliance.
To mitigate the security vulnerabilities that this partial visibility creates, unified certificate management is key. Without a unified solution in place, institutions cannot gain real-time insight into certificate status, expiration timelines, and issuance patterns.
Increased security and operational risks
Manual certificate management leads to significant security risks, but it also creates numerous operational inefficiencies. Manually handling certificate issuance, renewal, and revocation introduces room for human error, delays, and misconfigurations, all of which can open the door to vulnerabilities. Without automation, organizations are more likely to miss expiration deadlines or mismanage certificate deployments, leaving systems exposed.
When required to manage certificate issuance, renewal, and revocation manually, IT teams can often become overwhelmed, leading to a snowball effect where even more security concerns arise. As the volume of certificates grows across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, the manual workload can quickly exceed the capacity of even experienced teams. This leads to burnout, oversight, and inconsistent processes.
Without automation, teams also struggle to enforce consistent policies, monitor certificate health, or respond quickly to emerging threats. In high-stakes environments like financial services, these gaps can have serious consequences.
Opportunities for financial institutions to strengthen certificate management
While the challenges are formidable, there are also significant opportunities for financial institutions to strengthen their certificate management practices. Modern solutions such as Sectigo Certificate Manager (SCM) allow organizations to automate the process of managing digital certificates, creating plenty of opportunities to improve CLM while also improving process efficiency.
Automating certificate lifecycle management
CLM platforms that fully automate the process of monitoring, renewing, and replacing digital certificates eliminate both the inefficiencies of manual management and the risk of expired certificates. By continuously scanning for certificate status and triggering proactive renewals, these platforms help financial institutions stay ahead of expiration timelines, reducing the chance of outages or compliance violations.
For financial institutions, automating certificate lifecycle management offers a wide range of benefits, bolstering security while also freeing up IT teams to focus on other crucial tasks. With automation in place, teams no longer need to rely on spreadsheets or manual workflows, which are prone to oversight. Instead, they gain centralized control, streamlined workflows, and real-time visibility across all certificates.
Consolidating certificate management to gain unified visibility
By adopting a unified certificate lifecycle management solution, financial institutions can centralize the management of both public and private certificates, helping to eliminate blind spots and enabling consistent policy enforcement across the organization. This consolidation streamlines processes, reduces complexity, and improves security by providing a single source of truth for all certificate-related activities.
A unified CLM solution will also integrate seamlessly with your existing enterprise systems, including on-premise, cloud, or hybrid, helping further streamline processes and creating an infrastructure that is more transparent and resilient. Modern CLM platforms support API-driven integrations with popular ITSM, DevOps, and security tools, making it easy to embed certificate management into your existing workflows and technology stack.
Strengthening security
Automated certificate management strengthens security in several key ways. For one, it helps prevent expired certificates and the security vulnerabilities they create. But with a CLM solution such as SCM, you can also leverage automated monitoring and alerts to prevent fraud, phishing, and certificate misuse. Sectigo provides real-time insights into certificate status, helping eliminate the risks of manual certificate management and prevent security breaches.
Simplifying compliance
Automated CLM solutions create an excellent opportunity for financial institutions to simplify regulatory compliance. Not only do these solutions ensure that all digital certificates are properly managed in compliance with all regulatory standards, they also provide logging and tracking tools to help financial institutions respond quickly to compliance inquiries and are capable of generating audit-ready reports to ease the process of proving compliance.
Why financial institutions trust Sectigo for certificate lifecycle management
Expired certificates can lead to compliance failures and security breaches which are risks that financial institutions simply cannot afford. To combat this issue, more and more organizations are turning to automated CLM solutions designed to address the complex challenges of digital certificate management in the financial industry.
Built to scale across modern enterprise environments, Sectigo Certificate Manager offers a comprehensive, automated platform that helps financial institutions reduce risk, simplify compliance, and eliminate manual certificate processes. With SCM, teams can monitor, renew, and replace digital certificates automatically while generating detailed reports and insights that support operational efficiency and audit readiness.
See how Sectigo Certificate Manager streamlines certificate lifecycle management for financial institutions. Start your free trial today.