On the 10 September 2024, we held the second annual CMORG conference on ‘The Future of Resilience.’ 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.

This guidance provides a set of principles and broad expectations of the industry on how scenario testing with third parties should be conducted. This guidance is intended to be used by financial firms of all maturities as either a guidance for building a framework for scenario testing with third parties, or to act as a checkpoint for established programmes.

We are launching the first public-facing Sector Response Framework (SRF) Summary that provides a clear and concise overview of how the sector responds to a systemic incident. This is intended for everyone in the sector, from firms to their service providers, and is relevant for all levels of the organisation, from C-suite executives to Operational Resilience, Incident Management and Business Continuity Leads.

During severe operational disruption, the UK financial sector needs to be able to respond effectively, not just as individual organisations, but also as a collective. The Sector Response Framework (SRF) is the mechanism which facilitates this collective response in the event of severe and systemic disruption.

By Rachael Dickens, Senior Service Manager, Service Delivery & Operational Resilience CoE, CTO Technology, NatWest.

This guidance has been prepared to provide financial services firms a point of reference in their preparedness for the March 2025 implementation deadline.

By Michael Georgiou, Senior Manager, Group Operational Resilience Risk, LSEG

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We held our first conference on 28 September 2023, and we thank everyone for making it a huge success.