We held our first conference on 28 September 2023, and we thank everyone for making it a huge success.

With the theme ‘Resilience through Collaboration’, we had nearly 200 resilience professionals gathered to discuss the strategic risk landscape, third parties and supply chain, cyber and our exposure to other critical sectors. Along with senior leads from the authorities, Government, and industry on our panels, we were joined by Sam Woods, CEO of the PRA, who gave the keynote speech. We were also joined by our Co Chair, David Postings, CEO of UK Finance, who gave the opening remarks and John Taylor, External Member of the Prudential Regulation Committee, who gave the closing remarks.

The first panel covered ‘Strategic Response: Key risks to the sector and the future of resilience’. With an opening from Sarah Black, we also heard from our CMORG members Alistair Currie, Balbir Bakhshi and Marc Leaver, as well as Sharon Barber. The panel considered the key risk domains across industry and how much the sector has evolved, and continues to do so, to ultimately protect customers and society.

We then held a discussion on ‘Critical Sectors: Understanding the sector’s exposure to power and telecoms’. Moderated by Kieran Jones, and joined by Matthew Clarke, Julie Johnson and Lori Slack, this considered Government planning through the National Resilience Strategy and Risk Register, industry preparedness and the international and cyber exposures of CNI.

We heard from Jana Mackintosh on ‘The Quantum Future: The risks posed by emerging technology, including Quantum and AI’. This was before a panel led by Adam Avards, including Nick Levy, Craig Rice and Diego Rodriguez Mejias considered the future of technology in context of the geopolitical landscape, and their associated risks.

Marsha Quallo-Wright provided the opening to the ‘Cyber Arms Race: The evolving cyber threat and the weapons in our collective armoury’. The panel then considered the evolving cyber risks, the need to learn from one another and how cyber must be a non-competitive issue. This was brought to life by key examples of how other sectors have been supported by financial services, and how we work together through the likes of the FSCCC. Marsha was joined by Nick Seaver, Silas B and Nicola O'Connor, moderated by Daniel McCatty.

Then ‘Third Party Risk Management: Building resilience beyond the perimeter’, chaired by Adam Avards, and joined by Orlando Fernández Ruiz, William H. and Suman Z. This considered the changing regulatory perimeter and how we are increasingly dependent on our third parties, and what the regulatory response is to this.

Finally, Todd Conklin joined to provide international lessons in capability building. This provided an opportunity to compare and contrast collaborative approaches in the US and UK, along with considerations around where we can look to align our incident response structures in the future