Experienced SME advisory support to accelerate the enhancment and robustness of the Firm’s Operational Resilience plans

On 31 March 2021 the FCA published new rules and guidance (PS21/3) on Operational Resilience. These rules came into force on 31 March 2022 (after a 1 year implementation period) and firms must as soon as possible after this date, and by no later than 31 March 2025, have performed mapping and testing so that they are able to remain within impact tolerances for each Important Business Service (IBS).

We reviewed relevant documentation and designed and facilitated a series of workshops in order to develop a sustainable Operational Resilience framework including:

• Identifying the Firm’s Important Business Services (IBS);

• Setting Impact Tolerances for each IBS;

• Mapping of the people, processes, technology, facilities and information resources necessary to deliver each IBS;

• Mapping of any relationship outsourced to an external third party; • Identifying how an IBS could fail (risks of failure);

• Documenting procedures and measures to mitigate the risk of failure (controls in place);

• Identifying any current vulnerabilities in operational resilience framework;

• Developing action plans to address vulnerabilities; and

• Developing testing plans in order to ensure “regular” risk based testing of scenarios.

We provided templates to assist with the documentation of the framework.