Due to new and increasing threats in our global economy, regulators have had to get more prescriptive in recent years. Each country has its own set of rules and regulations that pertain to how they do business and how each transaction or product should be handled. As more and more firms adopt a global book of business their operations need to expand to accommodate all of these different requirements.
Therefore, the norm of working in silos and taking a fix on fail approach will have to change; there will have to be a culture shift in which resilience and technology will have to accommodate for the entire end-to-end process regardless of whether or not the function is revenue generating. Organizations will need more visibility into what the entire firm is working on to make the best use of resources and avoid duplicative efforts across multiple geographies. The best way to do this is to start looking at all of a firm's efforts by product (horizontals) rather than business area (verticals).
Think about resilience from beginning to end
At the very beginning of building a process or solution, ask yourself the following questions, and make sure you answer them before proceeding:
- How can I make this transparent, repeatable, and compliant?
- Who is impacted by the process?
- Is there a tech component?
- Do I need a failover?
- What are my dependencies upstream and downstream?
- How does this sit with the wider ecosystem?
- Is there anything I can leverage in a different business unit?
- Can I report in real time, or close to?
If you start thinking this way during your planning stages, you automatically begin to create a culture that doesn’t shy away from the dark matter that usually surfaces during regulatory scrutiny.
Resilience is everyone’s responsibility
When you're working towards an accountable culture where you are demonstrably compliant, you want to make sure that not only is everyone aware of the importance of resilience, but more critically: everyone is responsible for it. Accountability has to span all levels and you should also have the entire C-suite at your disposal: the CFO, CRO, and every MD at the bank. These are the people facing off to the regulator about these things for their area. They’re the ones who are laser-focused on the questions ‘how can we create more liquidity in the bank?’ and ‘how can we lend more?’
By building organization-wide accountability you can also avoid the common scenarios of excessive meetings, painstaking data gathering, or chasing certain people for information. Better orchestration and observability around regulation makes stakeholder involvement less painful and protracted by increasing accessibility to the data needed, promoting continuous visibility, and therefore vastly reducing the mundane, administrative, and tiresome tasks around it. This level of accountability is for the good of the firm, so it’s important to enable and promote better behavior.
Proactive tooling enables proactive behavior
Normally, the toolset you use drives overall behavior. So if your tools are reactive, your teams can’t be proactive - you don’t have the necessary capabilities at your disposal. For example, Excel and Sharepoint are great tools, they’re powerful and flexible, but their inherent functionality encourages a reactive, siloed culture, leading to siloed data, plans, and documents that stagnate as they require manual updating or reconciliation.
If your tool is proactive, then it’s much easier for you to build an accountable culture that supports better regulatory compliance. This is where Cutover comes in.
Adopting these key elements (tooling, personal accountability, and the end-end solution) is a targeted approach to developing both economic and operational returns on investment, as they are foundational building blocks for true operational resilience.
Find out how Cutover has helped major global banks meet CCAR requirements, achieve operational resilience, and improve business continuity planning.