VIDEO | With operational resilience increasingly becoming an area of focus for regulators, so has the related regulatory burden become heavier for market participants. The Operational Resilience Working Group set up by the International Securities Services Association (ISSA) aims to help market participants manage new regulatory requirements without getting lost in administrative complexities. At the PostTrade 360° Nordic 2024 conference, the session titled “Operational resilience (with ISSA)” took the audience through the group’s upcoming industry survey on the topic.
Operational resilience certainly isn’t a new concern within the post-trade space, but its relevance today is heightened. “It’s just that the dial is increasing given all the things we are doing from a technological standpoint – how we are modernising, and how things are becoming faster by leveraging the technology and new innovations,” said Alejandra Glass. She is the head of equities clearing and DTC settlement product management at DTCC and also a co-chair of ISSA’s Operational Resilience Working Group.
Watch the session video here!
When logged in, pick up your free access pass for this Nordic conference if you haven’t. Then browse back to this page, and the video will show up in this box.(Don’t have an account here yet? Register here. This is separate from the event platforms where you may have been signed up as a delegate.)
Login
Obstacles to resilience
One of the issues the group aims to address is the lack of a consistent approach to operational resiliency. Glass mentioned that key terms and definitions are “always slightly nuanced depending on which jurisdiction you are a part of”. “If we’re all measuring risk differently, clearly, the outcome is going to be different,” she pointed out. “The overarching goal is to have standardisation that is well adopted – and also well adopted by our supervisors.”
Another challenge the study aims to address, which she described as “a constant theme” recently, is geopolitical risk. “It is no longer a question of if it (a geopolitical event) happens. It’s more like when it happens, and how big of a magnitude it is going to be when it does actually take place,” she said. Being able to “deliver those critical services in the event something happens” would be “the key testament” to operational resilience.
Not a game of dominoes
Glass emphasised the importance of understanding interdependencies. “No one in this room does anything in a silo,” she reminded the audience. Besides knowing their own processes inside out, market participants should also work to understand their connections to everyone in the chain. “Make sure that you are defining what the critical services are and that you are able to pinpoint, in any particular breakdown, what it means upstream and downstream in the food chain – where are you and how are things going to be impacted further on?”
Speakers:
Karen Zeeb, COO and Company Secretary, International Securities Services Association (ISSA)
Alejandra Glass, Head of Equities Clearing & DTC Settlement Product Management | First Line Resilience and Control, DTCC
Hosted by ISSA
• The consolidated PostTrade 360° Nordic conference, in Stockholm on 4–5 September 2024, came to host 1,200+ delegates and featured 70 sessions.
• Our coverage relating to the event is indexed here.
• By the way … are we connected on LinkedIn already? Follow us here.
