This is intended for everyone in the sector, from firms to their service providers, and is relevant for all levels of the organisation, from C-suite executives to Operational Resilience, Incident Management and Business Continuity Leads.

During severe operational disruption, the UK Financial Sector needs to be able to respond effectively, not just as individual organisations, but also as a collective. This is facilitated through the Sector Response Framework (SRF), which is a series of Sector Response Groups, FMI Crisis Committees and supporting contingencies, that enable the sector to respond collectively to a systemic incident.

Recent incidents and exercises have taught us that we should always be vigilant of the risks that could crystallise into systemic disruptions at any time. Whether it is an IT disruption, a malicious cyber-attack, or a third-party failure, we need to be prepared and have the right response mechanisms in place. Learning from these experiences is crucial to ensure that firms, our response groups, and the Framework as a whole, works together as effectively as possible. 

As part of this, it is important that all participants in the sector, from C-suite executives to Heads of Operational Resilience and Incident and Business Continuity Managers, understand what the SRF is, the role of the Strategic and Tactical Core Response Groups, and how they as firms and individuals participate within it.

That is why the Cross Market Operational Resilience Group (CMORG) is launching this SRF Summary as a public (TLP Clear) document for all audiences. It is a simple, much shorter version of the SRF that tells you in a few pages what each core group does, the escalation points and triggers, and the membership criteria for each of the response groups. This should be the key document for you to use to engage with any internal and external stakeholder to consider how you, your firm and other groups participate in the collective response efforts of the sector.

As we look to further build upon and evolve our sector response capabilities, we will continue to explore how to support firms through detailed mapping of their interactions with the SRF, how information is shared between the relevant response groups and firms during an incident, and seek to promote the development of new and enhanced playbooks and processes which may need to be invoked to mitigate impacts and respond to specific scenarios. 

We thank those across the industry who have been instrumental in their continued support of maintaining and enhancing the SRF in peacetime, and in their execution and response coordination during an incident.