In the world of Operational Resilience, failure isn’t something to avoid - it’s something to learn from. This article explores why regulators such as the FCA and PRA expect firms to test beyond the point of failure, how effective crisis management teams respond under pressure, and why true resilience is built through challenge, not comfort.

Running scenario testing under the UK’s Operational Resilience framework is challenging. Designing severe, plausible and meaningful scenarios is not straightforward and can be a daunting prospect for firms both caught within the framework and the many more outside it who want to be seen to be doing the right thing.

The operational resilience of firms is crucial to UK financial stability. In this speech, Executive Director of Financial Market...

Author: Robin Hamilton Over the years, having been involved in many projects that have been initiated in response to drivers to improve service delivery, we have found that invariably, the project becomes an end itself, rather than a means of delivering the actual goal of improving service. So having an independent person solely focused on benefit realisation, who keeps asking the Big Y question on behalf of clients was critical. This aspect, which is sometimes overlooked, al

Author: Chris Goodeve-Ballard The Apostrophe Protection Society is a laudable body of individuals. They have a clear aim, they are fanatical about their subject, there are well known rules and they have a massive (if sadly hopeless) task ahead of them. For the record, I am in wholehearted support of them. ESG on the other hand, I find somewhat more troublesome – and I’m just thinking of the “G” aspect alone. ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance investing and r

Author - Chris Goodeve-Ballard 1. Assessment of Effectiveness By tracking your progress, you can assess the effectiveness of your...

Author: Chris Goodeve-Ballard It’s very tempting to think that we can all hide behind the big Company. When something goes wrong, there is a big skirt we can hide behind which ensures that there is always somebody else who can carry the can. Carlos Abarca knows differently. He was TSB’s Chief Information Officer and holder of a Senior Management Function (SMF) during the period of their disastrous IT migration project in 2018. This project is admittedly one of the poster boys

Author: Chris Goodeve-Ballard Operational Resilience might have been overtaken by Consumer Duty in the regulatory headlines but make no mistake, the FCA’s focus on Operational Resilience remains as strong as ever. The TSB fine just before Christmas was clearly a shot across the bows of the whole financial services sector, not just those in scope of the most recent rule changes. Our article on this goes into more detail as to why everybody should not only take notice but tak

Those of you with good memories will remember with glee the 31st March 2022. That was the day you relaxed and thought “mission accomplished”, which is a phrase George Bush Junior came to regret! Today the 31st March 2023 is now approaching faster and faster, as though you are being drawn towards it by a powerful elastic band. For those who are wondering, this is the absolutely latest date by which you should have renewed your Operational Resilience Self-Assessment document.

As many of you will have seen, TSB was fined a total of £48,650,000 by the FCA and the PRA on 20th December for Operational Resilience failings following its botched IT platform migration exercise in April 2018. Apart from the fact that this is the big Operational Resilience scalp we at Aldbury International have been predicting, there are a number of messages in this, simply from the regulators’ press release quite apart from the body of the Final Notices released by the FCA

Operational Resilience is yesterday’s project, Consumer Duty is today’s. Right and wrong. While the first Operational Resilience deadline was 31st March 2022 and Consumer Duty is a here and now issue, if you get the former right, it helps considerably with the latter. You may well be trying to move your Operational Resilience into BAU, but it is still a very real issue because if you fail in this area, you most definitely will not be fulfilling any duty you may have to your c

It’s the time of year when most firms will be thinking about next year’s budget. Have you put a separate budget aside for Operational...

We ran a webinar recently to give building societies an insight into what’s required of the FCA’s and PRA’s Operational Resilience...

Dragging “critical” third parties into their Op Res spotlight is something a lot of our clients are struggling to do, so this...

With an increasing number of high impact events affecting organisations, we’ve joined forces with leading tech company, CoBOS Technology, to produce an engaging and insightful Operational Resilience Scorecard, designed to empower organisations to implement the regulatory framework and achieve and maintain operational resilience. Industry leading scorecard Our experts have designed a unique Operational Resilience Scorecard in accordance with the Financial Conduct Authority’s a

Author: Robin Hamilton, CEO Now that the key milestone of March 2022, set by both the PRA and the FCA, has passed, we know that a lot of...

Background Aldbury International was commissioned to undertake an independent baseline assessment of an in scope dual regulated firm’s...

Author: Chris Goodeve-Ballard As a title, this is probably more prejudicial than is polite – but hey ho – why not? Those who subscribe to the FCA updates that pop into your inbox at the end of each day will have seen a not altogether unsurprising one regarding cyber security and Russia sent out last week. https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/operational-resilience/russian-invasion-ukraine Given what is happening in Ukraine and the ensuing risk to all businesses as well as national in

Author: Chris Goodeve-Ballard For those of you who had sat back, opened a bottle of Merlot and thought “phew – got that operational resilience stuff out of the way”, I’m going to wreck your day. By all means, finish your Merlot, but now the real work has to start. The deadline from the PRA and the FCA of 31st March 2022 wasn’t the end of the project but the squeezing of the trigger on the starting gun. Identifying your Important Business Services, your Impact Tolerances, carr

Author: Chris Goodeve-Ballard The day has arrived that to many of us was once unthinkable. I was a soldier in the early 80s and the idea...