Dynamic OpRes will see firms have highly flexible prediction, prevention, preparedness and response capabilities that are tested, challenged and adapted on a near constant basis. This will improve the customer experience and help firms streamline internal processes.
In our Operational Resilience (‘Op Res’) paper published in July 2021, we confidently made the statement that all firms should be aiming for Dynamic Op Res.
We 110% stand by this statement, but just why are we so passionate about helping clients achieve this?
At whyaye we strongly believe that every individual, no matter their background or situation, should have equal access to financial services products. Dynamic Op Res is a key enabler of this and we want to bring our passion, energy and customer focused approach to help clients on their journey.
We are not naïve and appreciate firms need to deliver an excellent customer service but do it in a cost efficient and effective manner. That’s why over the coming weeks we will be publishing a series of blogs to give you practical steps to help you move to Dynamic Op Res.
The move to Dynamic Op Res -
We have put our heads together and used our extensive experience working with clients of all shapes and sizes to come up with the challenges we see. While this may have a financial services slant (due to the recent regulatory focus) in our view it applies to all industries.
If you are a small organisation you might be able to achieve Dynamic Op Res manually with an appropriate data visualisation tool. However, the reality is this is not practical for everyone given the volume of data to be analysed. Dynamic Op Res requires risk, customer and operational data to be brought together. Manually linking and aggregating data to get a consistent and reliable view of Op Res by using teams of people is not cost effective, it does not provide real time reporting and it is prone to error.
That is ‘pain point’ number one for firms but there are related ones such as:
OpRes is a relatively new concept and firms are still learning and trying to get the right framework in place. When this is combined with ageing or unconnected systems it makes it very difficult to design and implement the right data model and solution to link, aggregate and monitor Op Res data. For example: what ‘people’ resilience metrics will you implement to identify any potential vulnerabilities that may prevent you recovering within impact tolerance? Do you have the data and solution to enable this?
And while we are talking about data it has to be noted that data quality continues to be a challenge due to these aging or unconnected systems and a lack of investment in data governance. Relying on static, manual, out of date, incomplete or lagging data will not allow organisations to implement Dynamic Op Res and be aware of a drift towards impact tolerance thresholds before an incident occurs.
And finally Op Res requires firms to think ‘end to end’. However, not all firms are structured that way. The risk team may have different reporting line to the cyber team to the third party team etc. Bringing together different functions with different agendas and requirements can be challenging. Who will own Dynamic Op Res? Who will pay for it? Are senior leadership all bought into the need for it? Firms are still debating these questions but will need to answer them in order to move to Dynamic Op Res.
In financial services we have observed great collaboration among firms in the last 12 to 18 months. This level of collaboration will need to continue as firms look to progress towards Dynamic Op Res. The journey won’t be easy and will require leadership support and all areas of the business working together.
In our series of blogs we will look at practical steps firms can take to address these challenges and realise benefits such as improving the customer experience and streamlining internal processes.
The next blog will focus on:
> What steps you need to take to reach Dynamic Op Res
> What does good look like?
> How do you practically assess and report on the volume of data that needs to be analysed?
Stay tuned and please drop us a note with any feedback you have.
By our Operational Resilience Mob
Download our point of view paper
Op Res is not a side of desk tick box exercise! It should be dynamic and a strategically important activity. Read our paper to find out more about our views on Dynamic Operational Resilience and what firms should be doing now.
