Kieran Maplesden
Founder & Managing Director
Kieran founded FourthLine in 2009 as a specialist regulatory change consultancy, supporting UK financial services firms through major regulatory programmes including Solvency II, MiFID II, and GDPR. That breadth of regulatory delivery across prudential, conduct, and data frameworks built the cross-cutting understanding of how regulators think, write rules, and supervise compliance that underpins every FourthLine engagement today.
In 2021, Kieran pivoted FourthLine to focus exclusively on operational resilience. The rationale was straightforward: the FCA and PRA's operational resilience framework represented the most significant shift in regulatory expectation for mid-tier financial services firms in a decade, and most firms did not have the internal capability to meet it without specialist support. FourthLine was rebuilt around that single problem.
Since 2021, Kieran has led more than 30 operational resilience and business continuity engagements across insurance, banking, investment management, and payments including supporting 20 or more firms through the March 2022 FCA and PRA policy requirements covering IBS identification, impact tolerance setting, vulnerability mapping, severe but plausible scenario testing, and self-assessment completion.
Recent engagements include designing and testing six material supplier exit plans for a global payments firm to DORA Article 28 standard ahead of the January 2025 deadline, delivering an organisation-wide BCM recovery planning programme for a leading UK insurer aligned to operational resilience and crisis management frameworks, and rectifying and uplifting the operational resilience programme, BCMS, and IT disaster recovery capability for a multi-asset investment brokerage against FCA PS21/3, SYSC 15A, SYSC 8, and SYSC 13A requirements.
His technical depth spans the full operational resilience architecture: FCA and PRA operational resilience frameworks, PRA outsourcing and third-party risk management, business continuity management system design and implementation, ICT disaster recovery, supplier exit testing, and cross-cutting obligations including Consumer Duty.
Kieran leads and delivers every FourthLine engagement personally. The practitioner you speak to in the first conversation is the practitioner responsible for your programme.