News
News
08.10.24
CMORG Conference 2024
On the 10 September 2024, we held the second annual CMORG conference on ‘The Future of Resilience' hosted by Deloitte and sponsored by Immersive Labs. It is clear that CMORG’s continued efforts to strengthen the financial service sector’s preparedness for operational disruptions are more necessary than ever. As key themes covered the Senior Managers view, preparedness for March 2025, and the wider ecosystem, a key theme was the need to focus on strategic outcomes that support the ecosystem as a whole.
The conference brought together 200 industry professionals to discuss the evolving operational resilience landscape. It featured panellists from Senior Managers and C-Suite to Heads of Operational Resilience, who offered detailed and valuable insights into how firms and third parties can strengthen resilience in an increasingly complex environment.
The opening panel, led by key CMORG members, provided views on how Senior Managers feel firm-level implementation of operational resilience was progressing. Panellists reflected on both success and challenges, sharing lessons learned from micro-level implementations within firms and the need post March 2025 to consider the strategic solutions for enhancing the resilience of the wider ecosystem. Chaired by Jana Mackintosh, UK Finance, CMORG members discussed how these efforts have helped firms prioritise resilience initiatives and be prepared to respond to severe but plausible scenarios.
The second panel, on reaching March 2025 was addressed expectations on firms leading up to March 2025 and considerations from industry on where firms should prioritise over the coming months. The key takeaway was the need to continue driving resilience outcomes beyond March 2025, with it being a cultural journey for all firms to drive forward, and cross-market collaboration playing an even greater role as firm level resilience is embedded.
The third panel, on creating a resilient ecosystem explored how the sector can build a culture of resilience through collaboration to benefit the wider ecosystem. This discussion considered evolving cyber risks, the importance of third, fourth and nth parties, and how everyone within the ecosystem plays a role in the resilience of the firm and the sector.
Overall, the emerging themes from the Conference demonstrated how integral sector collaboration is to ensuring resilience outcomes. As we move beyond March 2025 and consider the future of resilience, we need to explore and develop the strategic solutions that enable the ecosystem to be stronger together. CMORG will be a key driving force in enabling that industry collaboration to secure those outcomes.
Emma Mansfield, Co-chair ORCG, Panellist from session on Creating a Resilient Ecosystem:
'Operational Resilience is focused on the prevention of intolerable harm to customers, firms, and the market, ultimately protecting the real economy through the provision of vital services and maintaining confidence in UK plc. The CMORG conference brought together key experts from across the industry, the regulators, and the Bank of England, to share thought leadership on the journey to March 20025 and more importantly beyond. A key takeaway - it is only through active collaboration that we can build a truly resilient sector, whilst continuing to. . . mature individually'.
Panellist from session on Reaching March 2025:
The conference had an excellent agenda focused on the matters of greatest interest and concern to practitioners, namely preparedness for 2025 and how we enhance collective resilience. The SMF panel gave great food for thought on executive and Board perspective as well as the strategic vision for resilience going forward. This was well juxtaposed with the practitioner view where the delegates received practical advice on how to address key challenges around enhancements, testing and governance.
Moona Ederveen, Executive Director, FS-ISAC:
I was delighted to attend this conference to learn from such accomplished members of our industry. The speaker line-up was impressive! The balanced agenda allowed for synergistic networking with fellow attendees.
Key takeaways were the need to collaborate within and across sectors to keep on top of the changing ecosystem and its continuously evolving threats, such as ransomware. Whether one likes it or not, ransomware continues to be a problem with complex solutions, or a ‘headscratcher’, as a panellist opined.
CMORG-endorsed capabilities (including good practice guidance, response frameworks and contingency tools) have been developed collectively by industry to support the operational resilience of the UK financial sector. The financial authorities support the development of these capabilities and collective efforts to improve sector resilience. However, their use is voluntary, and they do not constitute regulatory rules or supervisory expectations; as such, they may not necessarily represent formal endorsement by the authorities.