Evolving Operational Resilience: Moving from Compliance to Capability

With the initial PRA/FCA compliance milestones behind them, UK banks must now focus on deepening and embedding operational resilience into everyday business practices. The FCA emphasizes that resilience isn’t a one-off exercise but a dynamic, strategic capability. Firms should now transition from mapping important business services and setting impact tolerances, to stress-testing these tolerances under increasingly sophisticated and evolving scenarios, including multi-party supply chain failures, geopolitical disruptions, and systemic tech outages. This means resilience should not only be reviewed annually but consistently pressure-tested against real-time developments.

Investments should now target uplifted capability maturity, such as advanced data analytics to monitor service health in real time, AI-driven risk pattern recognition, and dynamic mapping of interdependencies. Firms should upgrade from basic response plans to simulation-led playbooks, rehearsed across cross-functional teams. Additionally, there's growing pressure to measure resilience outcomes, so banks may need to adopt performance metrics tied directly to customer harm and financial stability impacts. These require more granular data and better integration between operational, cyber, and risk teams.

Leadership should champion this next phase by continuously aligning resilience outcomes with orgainsational strategy. This includes embedding it in product development, change initiatives, and prioritisation discussions. FS entities that treat operational resilience as a strategic differentiator, rather than a regulatory checkbox, will be better positioned to handle disruption, win customer trust, and navigate future scrutiny. Governance structures should be reviewed to ensure clear accountability, with risk culture and learning loops embedded through post-incident reviews and continuous training.

In the next few years, its is reasonable to predict that operational resilience maturity will be viewed not only as a compliance requirement, but as a hallmark of trust, agility, and long-term value in an increasingly volatile financial landscape.