Gaps remain in modern financial resilience

Finextra and Escode will host a webinar examining gaps in modern financial resilience. The session will feature Wayne Scott, Governance, Risk & Compliance Solution Lead at Escode, and will be moderated by Finextra contributor Jane Cooper.

The organisers say the webinar will explore how the move to cloud services and off-the-shelf software has increased banks’ and other financial firms’ reliance on third parties and complex supplier networks, creating hidden dependencies that can amplify operational risk.

Speakers will compare regulatory approaches to third-party risk. Some regimes require firms to secure digital supply chains. Other regulators issue guidance directed at suppliers. Several jurisdictions do not explicitly address concentration risk among critical providers.

The discussion will examine ways to engineer resilience into technology estates. Topics include designing systems with redundancy, isolating critical functions, and maintaining recovery plans for cloud-hosted services. The panel will also consider how controls and oversight should change to match new partnership models and delivery arrangements.

A central topic will be stressed exit strategies. The webinar will cover contractual and technical measures that allow firms to switch providers or operate independently if a supplier fails. Presentations will include mechanisms such as software escrow and other contracts that preserve access to essential code and data during a transition.

Panelists will discuss the impact of new technologies on operational risk. They will address how artificial intelligence in front- and back-office processes increases dependency on vendors and operational complexity, and how advances such as quantum computing could affect cryptography and system resilience in the medium term. The session will look at continuous monitoring and adaptive governance to keep resilience measures current as technology changes.

Practical oversight measures to be considered include maintaining supplier inventories, mapping dependencies to reveal indirect links between services, and regular stress testing of exit scenarios. The webinar will note the difference between financial loss metrics and operational resilience measures, and that some operational risks may not appear in balance sheets but can interrupt services.

The webinar is presented by Finextra in association with Escode and will cover regulatory responses, engineering approaches and contingency planning to address third-party and supply-chain risk.