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Operational Risk and Controls

Improving clients’ resilience to operational disruption

Operational resilience projects in the financial services address a firm’s resilience aim to prevent operational incidents from impacting customers, financial markets and the UK financial system. Today, regulators expect to see meaningful progress in the development of financial firms’ operational resilience capabilities. As a consequence, firm’s must proactively develop and progress their approaches to mapping and testing of services and technology, and ringfence any investment they believe will be needed to remediate vulnerabilities to ensure they can remain within certain impact tolerances. GreySpark works with clients to act efficiently with holistic views of systems, people and processes to establish the impact of disruptions, identify people responsible for addressing the risk, and proactively trigger real-time contingency plans to avoid disruption.

Our Value

While firms are embracing changes required to enhance their operational resilience, many struggle with the calibrations and approach to setting impact tolerances because the best practice for establishing the regulatory thresholds remains unproven. Developing impact tolerance statements is a useful way to articulate clearly to boards and regulators on how your firm has reached its impact tolerance conclusions.

Operational silos are one of the most well-known and common challenges facing firms in 2022. Legacy technology, inflexible business structures and jurisdictional expansion through acquisition, mean firms struggle to put in place cohesive policies and processes that can ensure the operational resilience of the business as a whole. The need for technological investment is vital to resolve operational disjointedness and analysing cross-silo patterns can help identify operational vulnerabilities and ensure uninterrupted service delivery when faced with an internal or external crisis.

GreySpark works with clients to create a holistic view of systems, people and processes and to establish the impact of disruptions, identify the people responsible for addressing the risk, and create triggers of real-time contingency plans to avoid disruption. We also help clients enhance their existing operational resilience framework using governance, risk and compliance (GRC) tools to deliver the optimal solutions for our clients.

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Service Elements

GreySpark brings an intimate understanding of Operational Resilience processes and technologies built from years of hands-on experience in banks and other financial institutions. We have the ability to combine and adapt a firm’s existing operational risk processes to make key services more resilient, and ensure the firm meets regulatory expectations and industry best practices.

Self-assessment & Enterprise-wide Assessment

  • Providing clients with templates and tools to create a robust and comprehensive self-assessment process
  • Delivering training for clients to carry out a self-assessment themselves
  • Undertaking an independent audit review of the client’s self-assessment to ensure it demonstrates compliance with regulation in that jurisdiction and that the firm has taken appropriate risk mitigation steps

Digitisation & Partnerships

  • Automating the often manual processes of reporting to the Board to secure strategic decisions and investment
  • Assisting clients with the digitisation of their operational resilience programmes to ensure the firm meets compliance and risk management standards
  • Collaborating with technology vendors to provide best-class solutions

Operational Risk Management

  • Producing risk mitigation plans and ongoing monitoring work to minimise operational disruption 
  • Assigning the ownership of key risks to maintain resilience practices
  • Helping clients to build a material risk inventory and create and monitor key KRIs and KPIs

Regulatory Advisory Services

  • Providing advisory services to support advancements in operational resilience and the changing regulatory landscape
  • Advising on the development of governance policies and the implementation of committees 
  • Analysing existing documentation and offering practical solutions to improve existing operational resilience processes

Remedial Planning & Implementation

  • Monitoring the output and evaluating whether the remediating activities meet the client’s operational resilience objectives
  • Defining a project management skillset and methodology for running a remediation project 
  • Assisting with ongoing remedial activities of the relevant gaps to help the firm build resilience

Best Practice Governance Framework

  • Building a best practice operational resilience framework to create the optimal governance policy and processes
  • Providing the tools and knowledge required to build an operational resilience organisation within the firm
  • Implementing effective and robust governance to break down existing siloes and move operational resilience into the overall operational risk management approach

Knowledge Repository

Find the information you need to help you navigate the complex business and technology challenges you face today.

Research

Our ever-growing repository of industry research contains authoritative, in-depth reports by our Capital Markets Intelligence (CMI) research practice.

Insights

Check out our Insights page of articles and short reports cultivated from the collective capital markets expertise of GreySpark’s UK Consulting Advisory and Project Delivery practice.

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