Look, your systems will fail. What is your backup plan? • The register

It was said today to the banks to badume that there would be problems with the systems and work on their contingency plans following a series of failures caused by the increasing recourse to technology.

In a joint document, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England's Prudential Regulatory Authority said that operational resiliency failures pose a risk to vital services, consumers and businesses alike. -Same.

Although described as a discussion paper, the document makes clear that regulators The paper notes that banks are facing new challenges through technical innovations such as distributed ledger, customer demand for instant access or mobile, greater dependence on resilience. outsourcing, and an increase in cyber incidents and system complexity.

Taken together, this has risen This risk means that banks now have to expect problems with systems or processes and work on plans to minimize the impact on business services.

"Avoiding the disruption of a particular system supports operational resilience." He said. "But in the end, that's the business service that needs to be resilient – and must continue to be provided. "Boards and executives should badume that individual systems and processes that support business services will be disrupted."

This means focusing on the impact more wide disturbances – not just about the restoration of systems and processes – for example, setting standards for a maximum downtime acceptable for a business service and testing that with "severe but plausible scenarios." [19659002] They are also told to map products and services to the underlying systems, to identify how the issues will affect customers and the viability of the business, and to deal with the speed and complexity of the business. efficiency of communications with users. The report was criticized for the way it handled the computer crisis in which customers were unable to access services for a week in late April, thanks to

The boss's reaction Paul Pester's chaos bank even prompted the Treasury Committee to make the unprecedented decision of writing to the bank's president (PDF) to question his suitability to play this role

. the committee was furious with "complacent and deceptive" public communications that did not recognize customer issues after Pester went so far as to claim that the migration had been successful.

In this context, the focus of the paper on the communications and the need It is hardly surprising to tackle the overall impact of the disruption instead of. pay particular attention to individual systems.

Banks, professional badociations and consumer badociations had until October 5 to respond to the document. ®

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