Wolters Kluwer Invited to Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority Advisory Roundtable Focused on Building U.K. Financial Sector Operational Resilience

Wolters Kluwer’s Compliance Program Management (CPM) business has been invited to take part in a major industry roundtable devoted to discussing strategies for building operational resilience in the U.K.’s financial services sector.

The advisory roundtable, jointly organized by The Bank of England and the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), takes place today and includes Partner level participants from some of the biggest law firms, consultancies and accounting firms. Wolters Kluwer is the sole technology provider taking part in the event and will be providing expertise relating to operational risk implications.

In July 2018 the FCA and Bank of England released a joint discussion paper on Operational Resilience. They are now running a series of events to support the discussion paper, including this advisory roundtable.

The paper envisages that boards and senior management can achieve better standards of operational resilience through increased focus on setting, monitoring and testing specific impact tolerances for key business services which define the level of disruption that could be tolerated. “The challenges for operational resilience have become even more demanding given a hostile cyber environment and large scale technological changes. As recent disruptive events illustrate, operational resilience is a vital part of protecting the U.K.’s financial system, institutions and consumers,” the regulators said at the time.

Representing Wolters Kluwer at the roundtable will be Brian Gregory, Vice President, Non-Financial Risk/Governance, Risk and Compliance, EMEA, for Wolters Kluwer’s CPM business.

The decision to take part in the event is part of Wolters Kluwer’s ongoing commitment to contribute regulatory and operational risk insights to the industry as a whole. “This advisory roundtable provides a great opportunity to hear directly from the leading lights that are contributing to this most important of subjects,” commented Gregory. “Key questions up for discussion include what are participants’ views on the proposed focus on continuity of business services? I will also be exploring whether a service rather than systems-based approach represents a significant change for firms and financial markets infrastructures (FMI) firms compared with existing practice.”

A Chartered Accountant by background, Gregory is a former auditor for Enrst & Young. His wide experience in the financial services technology industry includes senior director positions at Oracle and risk management leadership positions at IBM. He joined Wolters Kluwer in June 2015 and is responsible for the overall financial and market success in EMEA for Wolters Kluwer’s CPM business.