Friday 5 Round-Up: Operational Resilience in Financial Services - Episode 6

Another week brings another operational resilience round-up for us here at OpRes. It’s been a big week across financial services with the likes of JPMC launching a new digital-only proposition under their Chase brand in the United Kingdom. Money 2020 has been hosted over in Amsterdam and as ever, there has been a raft of operational resilience news beats which we have had the pleasure of curating for you all. 

After a long working week, I am sure you all want to slip off for the weekend and put your feet up. So let’s get to it and take you through the week’s operational resilience highlights in a rapid fashion.

Monday 20th September: OpRes Show & Tell

OpRes show & tells are a lot like waiting for buses. You wait all week waiting for one and then two arrive in quick succession….. Or so the saying goes! This week we covered the application logic stored within OpRes that allows financial services organisations to generate and report on their operational resilience posture using a dynamic framework. If you have 20-minutes to spare and are interested to learn more about the framework we explain the following in detail: 

• The Match, Meet & Exceed resilience scoring framework in OpRes.

• How the scoring framework unearths potential resilience gaps.

• Discuss how the scoring framework drives key operational resilience dashboards.

• Demonstrate how this reporting is then aggregated against an example important business service and supplier.

Monday 20th September: CIO Spotlight: Gary Delooze, Nationwide 

IDG conducted a CIO Spotlight with the CIO of Nationwide, Gary Delooze. For those who are unfamiliar with Nationwide, they are in fact the world’s biggest building society and are presently embarking on a widescale tech transformation program that is underpined by the public cloud. In the briefing, Delooze discusses Nationwide’s strategic priorities. One of which is operational resilience.

Tuesday 21st September: Basel Committee calls for improved cyber resilience

Over at ContinuityCentral.com there was a publication reporting on a newsletter published by the Basel Committee calling on banks to improve their resilience to cyber threats. This follows the Committee's meetings of 15th and 20th September, during which it assessed risks and vulnerabilities to the global banking system and discussed supervisory and policy initiatives. The newsletter puts cyber resilience in context with the operational risk and operational resilience and you can read the newsletter here.

Wednesday 22nd September: Bank of England says to boost competition in banking, adapt to Brexit

Reuters reported on a statement by The Bank of England highlighting that it will work to encourage more new entrants in the banking sector as it readies for post-Brexit reforms after proving resilient during the COVID crisis. In the publication, Bank of England Deputy Governor Sam Woods is quoted as saying, “Looking across the banking and insurance sectors as a whole, capital and liquidity positions are strong and operational resilience has largely held up to COVID and cyber pressures.”

Wednesday 23rd September: Material Outsourcing to the Public Cloud: Identifying Sub-Processors for the Big 3

Earlier this week, we received a handy little update from Google that highlighted several changes in their list of approved sub-processors that operate as third-party suppliers across the suite of products on GCP. Curiously, we quickly checked both AWS and Azure for similar material and quickly identified their respective responses as well. This led to us creating a snappy post that shares a number of helpful links and documents from the leading cloud service providers and their respective responses to third-party risk, EBA compliance, cloud exit strategy, and PCI compliance amongst other things! Take a look here.

Thursday 23rd September: FCA to use blockchain to speed up regulatory reporting

Whilst not exclusively operational resilience-related. We thought this report from Finextra was worth resharing. A joint initiative between the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England is exploring how a blockchain-based digital regulatory reporting framework can tackle the growing costs of compliance checks. We are all ears for exploring how regulatory costs and overheads can be reduced for firms, whilst increasing transparency across the industry. As such, we will be keeping a close eye on this front. 

Thursday 23rd September: Minutes of the London FXJSC Operations Sub-Committee Meeting - 9 June 2021

Over at the Bank of Englands (BoE) website, we caught wind of some minutes from an FXJSC Operations Sub-Committee session held back in June 2021. The Bank of England’s own Jonathan Sepanski and Orlando Fernández Ruiz were in attendance providing the committee with an overview of the BoE’s operational resilience policy statement. In addition to its complimentary third-party risk management policies. You can read the minutes here. 

Thanks for reading! 

That’s it for this week’s round-up. 

Thanks for reading and if you want to have Operational Resilience news beats sent directly to your mailbox, then feel free to register your details via our online form.

Have a great weekend! 

Ben