I recently hosted an event on operational resilience during ServiceNow's Knowledge^® 2020 Digital Experience. My guests from Lloyds Banking Group and Santander UK shared their experiences of maintaining operations at the front line during the crisis and their approaches to the new era ahead. Our session highlighted some key insights, many of which are explored further in our new White Paper on operational resilience.

Operational resilience in the spotlight

Even before Covid-19's unprecedented impact on financial services, UK regulators were focusing on the ability of financial institutions and firms to respond to unforeseen events. The regulators now actively want to know how quickly financial firms and institutions can recover after a major disruption.

Recently, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) published its own consultation paper on Operational Resilience. Its focus was on the management of operational risk and the need to ensure that effective frameworks for risk management were in place and being executed in banks.

Whether you take a services-based or risk-based view of operational resilience, the themes of preparing for, avoiding and recovering from unforeseen events are consistent. The need to manage the complexity that this entails through coherent data is paramount.

The other consistent factor, and the main reason why a financial services organisation might not be as resilient as it might wish to be, is fragmentation. The disjointed nature of data, tooling, workflows, services and initiatives in financial services is arguably the single biggest threat to an organisation's ability to effectively and consistently deliver great services to its customers.

Starting your journey to resilience

Recent examples have demonstrated that even the most apparently robust business service can fail in extreme circumstances. When services fail and risks materialise, operational resilience focuses on the ability (and speed) to recover from that failure, and to adapt and learn from the experience.

We see architectural simplification, data and tooling rationalisation, cost reduction and better customer and employee experience all as a direct result of initiatives being put in place to address regulation.

In that regard, the most operationally resilient organisations are also likely to be the most efficient and economical with a positive impact on risk adequacy, customer agility and a direct impact on top line growth. Operational resilience is a ?win-win?.

Your route to operational resilience involves understanding what is most important to your organisation - and protecting that.

As one of our Knowledge^® 2020 attendees commented: ?It's not just about ticking a box. It's about how we embed resilience into our culture and drive it throughout the organisation - to ensure scalability and sustainability.?

Your organisation's ability to manage and leverage data is critical to building strong and sustainable operational resilience. With the right technology and approach, you can put your customer first, and put data intelligence at the heart of risk management and service continuity.

For your six-step guide to delivering more resilient services, read our new White Paper on operational resilience for Financial Services.

You can also join me, UK Finance and Lloyds Banking Group at our recent Now at Work UKI digital event, on the ?Back to the Future of Finance? panel in the inspiration for what's next channel. To join us visit Now at Work 2020

ServiceNow are a Content Partner at the upcoming UK Finance Digital Innovation Summit (2-20 November) - learn more about this online event here.