Financial Services Ireland

LEADING THROUGH VOLATILITY

Operational resilience: how to withstand, respond and recover your business

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Operational resilience is a set of techniques that allow people, processes and informational systems to adapt to changing patterns. It is the ability to alter operations in the face of changing business conditions.

Three key capabilities underpin resilience: business continuity management, third party management and operational risk.  Resilience forms an umbrella across these capabilities and they must individually and collectively be enhanced and continuously integrated to help achieve desired resilience outcomes.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there are a number of specific factors emerging:

People: Covid-19 is driving a consistent set of people issues across the financial services industry.  With workforces being unavailable for short or protracted periods of time and people having to adapt to working from home this provides a range of new challenges. Read our latest insights on leading practices in remote working. 

Premises: The ongoing nature of the pandemic is making lots of organisations’ premises recovery strategy invalid.  With travel restrictions being placed in many countries people cannot get to primary operations or recovery sites which is testing home working capability.

Third Parties: The rapid spread of the Covid-19 is impacting economic growth and market volatility is increasing, thus impacting the industry with adverse impact on the capital position of financial institutions around the world.  From a Third Party Risk Management (TPRM) perspective, it remains key to understand the risk profile of the third party inventory, and continue to risk assess critical third parties to understand their ability to keep providing continuity of services. Read our latest insights on Third Party Risk Management and the impact of Covid-19. 

Processes: During the crisis, clients need to focus on their core offerings and adapt to the changing needs of their customers and the unfolding situation.

Technology: Maintaining the technology bandwidth and infrastructure to deal with the ongoing and escalating demands of the pandemic response and client requirements.

EY can provide support across a range of capabilities:

  • Support with governance, communications and stakeholder management
  • Defining a target operating model to manage and monitor resilience
  • Mapping critical services and identifying weaknesses such as single points of failure
  • Assessing maturity of resilience assets and capabilities
  • Modifying governance, risk and control frameworks
  • Supporting simulation and scenario exercises including stress testing
  • Program assurance and subject matter support with regulatory and hands-on implementation experience
  • Aligning operational resilience and operational risk frameworks and processes
  • Integrating operational resilience and other in-flight regulatory work programs such as PSD2 Reg 98, EBA Outsourcing and EBA IT and Security Risk Management changes

Download the document below to explore these topics in greater detail. You can also review our latest insights and thinking to support you in leading through these volatile times; don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.

Thought Leaders


Jerry O’Sullivan

FS Executive Director, Risk

Cormac Kelly

International Banking Consulting Lead



Operational resilience response to Covid-19

How to withstand, respond and recover your business through the Covid-19 crisis

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