Today, even an hour of downtime can cost millions of pounds, making operational resilience one of the biggest challenges for financial services. Increasingly, it is being recognised, not just as a compliance requirement but as a strategic foundation for delivering value and maintaining trust.
The financial ecosystem has never been more interdependent. With firms relying on increasingly complex digital infrastructures and third-party vendors to deliver services at speed and scale, resilience is no longer just about continuity, it’s about maintaining customer confidence, safeguarding reputations, and ensuring regulatory alignment amid constant disruption.
The recent UK Finance briefing laid bare the sector’s pressing challenges: regulators demanding fail-proof continuity plans, cyber threats evolving at machine speed, and supply chains becoming increasingly fragile. These aren’t hypothetical scenarios, they’re today’s operating reality.
In particular, the supervisory focus from the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority on ‘important business services’ has pushed financial institutions to deeply re-examine not only their internal operations but also their ecosystem of dependencies. Meanwhile, high-profile outages across banking and payments in the past year have highlighted the reputational damage and regulatory scrutiny that follow even momentary lapses in service availability.
The dialogue around resilience has shifted. It’s no longer sufficient to rely solely on disaster recovery plans. Industry leaders are investing in real-time monitoring, chaos engineering, and adaptive infrastructure that can not only withstand but evolve in the face of sophisticated threats. For vendors and in-house technology teams alike, the conversation has moved toward resilience as a competitive differentiator.
The growing regulatory focus on scenario-based testing such as through the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), is reshaping expectations. Financial institutions are increasingly looking to their partners not just for recovery assurance but for continuous availability even in degraded states.
The most effective responses are proactive, not reactive: testing systems against realistic failure scenarios, embedding resilience in vendor management processes and ensuring that lessons from industry-wide incidents are applied before crises occur.
Technology providers have a vital role to play here. Security frameworks such as ISO 27001 and SOC 2 can serve as indicators of operational maturity but they must be underpinned by day-to-day disciplines, not just frameworks. As the industry grapples with emerging risks, the exchange of frontline insight between providers and financial institutions is becoming essential.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) introduces both opportunity and complexity into the resilience equation. While AI and machine learning can enhance threat detection and anomaly resolution, they also introduce new risks that require governance and oversight. As financial firms embrace these technologies, ensuring their responsible and secure deployment becomes critical to resilience planning.
Operational resilience is no longer just an IT concern; it’s a strategic imperative. The institutions that lead will be those who anticipate change, embed resilience by design and build the confidence to innovate without compromising stability. In a digital-first, always-on world, that confidence is what underpins long-term trust in financial services.
Warren Higgins is chief information officer at Phoebus Software
