This Thursday marks 6 months until the FCA’s operational resilience requirements come into force for the UK’s financial services sector – just under two years since the parliamentary committee called on regulators to intervene following TSB’s IT meltdown. According to Guy Warren, CEO of ITRS Group and ex-COO of FTSE Group, if firms can’t afford to prioritise operational resilience, they can’t afford to be in business.
"Far from moving towards greater operational resilience in that time, businesses’ IT estates have only grown larger and more unwieldy. The rush to adapt to pandemic-enforced digital transformation has seen many rapidly move to insecure work-from-home systems, combine Cloud and physical premises, and spread their estates over numerous new outsourced SaaS providers with a view to slimming down their business models.
As a result, the financial services sector has opened its doors to new silos and operational blind spots and weaknesses, leading to an uptick in IT failures, not to mention huge inefficiencies and unnecessary loss of capital.
On a societal level, with many more banks and other service providers now existing in the digital-only realm, if something goes wrong, it can go end-of-the-world wrong. There are often no failovers in place, and definitely no brick-and-mortar branches to go and pull your money from as a last resort.
The resilience of IT systems no longer falls to the back office. To meet requirements on time and avoid punitive consequences, including hefty fines on individual senior managers, the UK’s financial C-suite must put operational resilience at the top of the agenda by committing serious investment towards data analytics and estate monitoring technology, and making sure there is personal, senior responsibility for the operational resilience of their firms.
There will be no excuses made for shortcuts or sub-par capabilities. While it might seem costly at a time when most businesses are operating on small margins, the bottom line is this: if you say you can’t afford to prioritise the operational resilience of your systems, then you can’t afford to be in business."
- Guy Warren, CEO of ITRS Group
