Friday Five Round-Up 2: Operational Resilience in Financial Services
Published by Ben Saunders - OpRes Founder
Roughly a 2-minute read
Welcome to our second ever Friday 5 round-up where we discuss all manner of things operational resilience-related!
This week has seen a number of announcements with cyber insurance firms reeling from a disruptive 18-months. Service outages were experienced at one of Google’s newest regions. Reuters commented on the FCA’s business plan. Whilst a new market entrant is launching an insurance product to protect firms against losses, in light of internet and technology disruptions that hit their revenues. But let’s not give it all away in the first paragraph. Read on to learn more!
24/08/2021 -UK financial regulator business plan: key takeaways and potential enforcement focus
Reuters took the time this week to cover the FCA’s business plan. Reinforcing its key areas of focus regarding operational resilience, ESG, vulnerable customers, and its own diversity agenda. In respect of operational resilience, the editorial covers “ the FCA’s emphasis on 'impact tolerances' (the maximum tolerable amount of disruption to an important business service), requiring the use of mapping exercises to prepare 'impact tolerances' for important business services, and the testing of such 'impact tolerances' through disruption scenarios. All items that we are aiming to cover with OpRes!
25/08/2021 - Google Cloud hit by outage in new Melbourne, Australia, region
Google's newest cloud region went down for 1 hour and 30 minutes due to 'transient voltage' issues that rebooted network hardware. This was covered by data center dynamics. The region has only been available for one month and it was reported that services utilising Google’s cloud networking capabilities would have experienced some form of operational resilience disruption.
25/08/2021 - “Domino effect” as cyber insurers, brokers react to losses
“The cyber insurance market is in a state of mass disruption. The ransomware epidemic of the past 18 months has caused a major uptick in the frequency and severity of cyber insurance losses. As a result, insurance carriers are doing anything they can to mitigate their exposure and protect their balance sheets”. That’s what has been reported over at Insurance Business Magazine.
Cyber resilience has a crucial part to play in the wider operational resilience agenda and it’s not surprising to see this posture being taken by insurers.
26/08/2021 - New cloud outage insurance offers downtime protection
Negotiating contracts with cloud service providers can be notoriously tricky. With next to zero wiggle room regarding the terms and conditions that firms sign-up to when they adopt a chosen cloud provider. It’s the same for start-ups as it is with enterprise customers. Indeed, with regulators placing greater levels of scrutiny on outsourced cloud providers across financial services. It’s not surprising to see new market entrants looking at how they can support customers in protecting their revenue positions when service disruptions are experienced. German insurer Element Insurance AG has partnered with Israel-based IT downtime insurance provider Parametrix Insurance Services LLC to debut parametric cloud outage insurance. You can read more about this story over at businessinsurance.com.
The product is presently aimed only towards the German market. However, it will be interesting to see how this evolves and what traction it gains across the financial services sector in the coming quarters.
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! All the best,
Ben
