Friday Five Round-Up 1: Operational Resilience in Financial Services
Welcome to the first-ever Friday Five Operational Resilience Round-Up!
With just under 7 months to go until firms need to have completed their initial round of important business service mapping and scenario testing. The operational resilience agenda is really starting to hot up across the financial services sector. As such, we intend to share a weekly summary of all the latest and greatest operational resilience-related news that has come to light in the last week. No doubt there will be some weeks that are slower than others! However, we thought it prudent to collect the latest insights and information from across the industry in order to share knowledge with our peers and customers across financial services.
We hope you enjoy the read and by all means, feel free to share your feedback or interesting news beats with us @OpRes HQ!
14/08/2021 - Governing Third-Party Risk Management & Operational Resilience with OpRes
Here at OpRES HQ we were busy over the weekend tapping away on our keyboard, during a day trip to sunny Manchester! In our latest blog post, we covered the agenda of third-party risk management and discussed how we are building a reporting tool within OpRes to track and audit your third-party supplier’s evidence of compliance standards. Whether this is related to SOX, ISO, or wider ESG related matters. Check out that blog here.
16/08/2021 - FDITECH Sprint Program: From Hurricanes to Ransomware: Measuring Resilience in the Banking World
FDITECH is on a mission to promote the adoption of innovative technologies across the financial services sector. Created in 1933 to maintain stability and public confidence in the nation's financial system under the banner of the FDIC. FDITECH marks a new chapter in the agency’s continued evolution and efforts to ensure safety and soundness in today’s financial marketplace. In order to identify opportunities for innovation, they have created the Sprint Program.
The FDITECH’s sprint program brings a diverse set of stakeholders (e.g., banks, non-profit organizations, academic institutions, private sector companies, members of the public) together in collaborative settings for a short period of time to intensely focus on challenges of importance to the FDIC. A ‘sprint’ simply refers to a short period of time (typically 2-3 weeks) where teams turn ideas into value.
As part of their latest initiative, they are looking to identify solutions and capabilities in order to address the following exam question “What would be the most helpful set of measures, data, tools, or other capabilities for financial institutions, particularly community banks, to use to determine and to test their operational resilience against a disruption?”
Interested parties who wish to participate in the sprint can register via the FDITECH website. Whether you are a banking customer, a bank, a technology supplier, or an industry commentator they are keen to hear from you!
16/08/2021 - ADIB recognised for its operational resilience by Business Continuity Institute
Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank (ADIB) has announced it received two major awards at this year’s Business Continuity Institute (BCI) Middle East Awards ceremony. The Business Continuity Institute Middle East Awards aims to identify institutions that have outstanding business continuity, risk, and resilience practices. ADIB has been recognised for the "Most Effective Recovery" and having the best "Continuity and Resilience Team" for the year 2021, making it only one of three corporations to be recognised in the region and only one to receive awards in multiple categories.
Read the full editorial via the Emirates News Agency website.
Operational Resilience: Documenting Your Extreme Yet Plausible Scenarios in One Sentence
“As an operational resilience SME, I want to view my workload distribution, so that I can understand concentration risks with cloud service providers across my important business services.” Earlier this week we published a blog post about how firms can start to identify their extreme, yet plausible disruption scenarios using agile and product-oriented thinking. Starting with a single sentence, we cover other considerations firms must take in order to feed into a robust and meaningful scenario testing strategy.
17/08/2021 - Google Cloud: Cloud Adoption is Increasing in FS, but More Guidance is Needed From Regulators
The Fintech Times reported on a recent study published by Google that explored cloud adoption and deployment within the financial services sector. The survey asked more than 1,300 IT leaders about their organisations’ adoption of cloud for key workloads, perceptions of opportunities available to cloud-forward companies, and the challenges that could prevent continued cloud adoption.
Some key survey findings included:
Firms that have adopted public cloud as part of hybrid or multi-cloud approaches report higher technology satisfaction levels than firms using on-premises computing infrastructure.
83% of surveyed financial services companies report they are deploying cloud technology as part of their primary computing infrastructure.
On average, only about half of all workloads have been transitioned to the cloud, meaning that there is still work to be done.
Regulatory uncertainty and the high cost of the regulatory approval processes are the top two obstacles to continued cloud adoption.
You can read the full report on Google’s website.
18/08/2021 - 'Spreading the risk' using multi-cloud
David Linthicum of Deloitte has published an article over at Infoworld where he talks about operational risk with the public cloud. With a specific focus on how a multi-cloud strategy can prevent lock-in, enable greater business value, and placate regulatory concerns.
19/08/2021 - CBN Moves to Strengthen Cybersecurity in Other Financial Institutions
Operational resilience is becoming a strategic imperative globally. This has been further reinforced by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), which has cited the growing sophistication of cyber-attacks means they need to strengthen the operational resilience of the firms under its regulation.
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
