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The Business Case for Operational Resilience

Globally many financial services firms have prioritised operational resilience during the last two years, ensuring they have a robust programme in place to safeguard against disruption to services and products to customers when unforeseen internal or external events occur. 

A key reason for this shift in priority has been driven by financial regulators across the globe, but there are many other sound business reasons to build operational resilience, not only driven by regulatory requirement.

Developing an end-to-end operational resilience strategy supports and improves the ability for firms to immediately respond and adapt to unforeseen changes in the environment, systems, and processes, to ensure continuous delivery of services and products to customers.

But what are some of the business benefits of implementing and maintaining a good operational resilience programme?

Reputational

A firm’s reputation is fully reliant on its resilience to service outages when unforeseen incidents occur.

When important business services fail and harm customers trying to access their financial services, then the reputational damage to a firm can be catastrophic. 

Such public failings could impact share prices, increase liquidity risk, cause brand damage and impact market capitalisation.

Financial Services firms with robust operational resilience programmes can in turn improve their reputation and customer loyalty if they manage potentially disruptive incidents swiftly and effectively with no or little impact on essential services to customers. 

Financial

Operational resilience requires robust, integrated infrastructures, IT systems and inter-departmental processes.  By simplifying internal systems and processes it creates increased system automation and less resource waste on manual processes. 

More efficient use of people and resources translates directly into cost savings.

One of the most valuable outcomes of a good Operational Resilience programme is that firms can better prioritise and group future investments in the technology, infrastructure and headcount that underpins their Important Business Services.  These are often the services that impact the greatest number of customers and generate the most revenue. By identifying which of those services is most vulnerable and most likely to breach impact tolerances, senior management has a clear view of required investment decisions.

Outsourcing

In today’s connected cloud-based world, firms depend on outsourced and 3rd party suppliers to deliver important business services. 

This dependence on 3rd parties leads to less control over important business services.  When for example, a cyber-attack is launched on a 3rd party supplier, that attack could directly disrupt your service delivery to customers. Many financial service firms have traditionally not controlled outsourced and 3rd party risk management effectively.  

Aligning your firm’s OTPRM with an operational resilience programme creates a pro-active and robust approach to managing 3rd party risk, which in turn will protect your firm’s reputation and financial stability even when disruption outside your firm occurs.

How FourthLine can help:

FourthLine is working with a number of financial services clients to help them plan, implement and manage an operational resilience programme through a mixture of consulting and resourcing propositions.

Download our operational resilience service deck  here>

 

How FourthLine can help:

FourthLine is working with a number of financial service firms to help them with Operational Resilience enablement and Outsourcing and 3rd-Party Risk Management, through a mixture of end-to-end consulting and resourcing options.

March 3, 2022
Jakes de Kock
Jakes is FourthLine's Marketing Director. He specialises in omni-channel, tech-enabled inbound marketing strategies to drive business growth within the b2b sector.
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