A new normal
Coronavirus (COVID-19) has impacted our daily lives on a blockbuster scale. Governments are mandating behaviour, cities are in lockdown, hospitals are in overdrive, individuals are isolating themselves and businesses are having to adopt a sustained crisis management mentality.
Financial services firms have, like others, been hit hard. Frontline staff are under pressure, both internally and from the Government, to respond to volatile financial markets and provide financing support to impacted customers. This is especially important given the role FS firms must now play in helping businesses to secure government-backed loans. Other areas of the business, such as IT support functions, are frantically reprioritising work to deal with the COVID-19 response. The distraction is leaving firms more vulnerable to other threats, such as cyber-attacks or data leaks. All the while, there is a need to maintain calm and order, as any uncertainty will lead to further contagion in the markets. So much so that UK regulators have announced measures to minimise demand on the industry’s existing capacity, such as “allowing listed companies an extra two months to publish their audited annual financial reports” and pushing back the deadlines for certain regulatory deliverables.
In this light, it is now more critical than ever that organisations assess their underlying operational resilience and their ability to respond to and recover from high impact incidents. Coronavirus has become the litmus test for an organisation’s operational resilience.
The ramifications of operating in a ‘COVID’ environment
Stopping the spread of Coronavirus between staff has been a key priority for organisations in order to avoid the business disaster of contagion impacting…
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