Acknowledging the growing potential for future disruptions to critical business services that could create market instability, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the premier market infrastructure for the global financial services industry, today called for establishing business resilience as an industry-wide priority in a new white paper, Resilience First.

In the paper, DTCC says a paradigm shift is required to protect the global financial system from the significant threats posed by cyber-attacks, the rapid development and adoption of new technologies, the increased interconnectedness of the financial ecosystem, and growing industry-wide concentration risks, among other dynamics. Business resilience refers to an organization’s ability to safeguard its critical services against the threat of potentially disruptive events, regardless of their nature or origin.

“With the threat of potential disruptions continuing to grow, firms can no longerafford to focus on disaster recovery, business continuity management and cybersecurity in isolation,” said Dan Thieke, Managing Director, Business Risk & Resilience Management. “Resilience initiatives should look holistically at threats and aim to safeguard critical business services against a wide range of technical, physical, logical or financial disruptions.”

In the paper, DTCC highlights the need for a holistic, forward-looking and highly collaborative approach to business resilience. Rather than solely focusing on individual processes, business resilience efforts should be broadened to include all relevant stakeholders, consider an end-to-end perspective across critical business services, incorporate resilience into the initial design of new products and services, and ensure full business ownership.

The paper also describes a set of core principles and supporting guidelines that can further resilience efforts. The principles and guidelines were developed for DTCC but can be adopted by a wide range of entities looking to make their critical business services even more robust.

To move forward, ongoing industry collaboration will be necessary to ensure readiness to mitigate the impact of technical, physical or logical disruptions to critical business services.

“We are committed to leveraging our experience to lead the discussion on the evolution of industry-wide resilience. This is a key strategic enabler that is consistent with our mission to deliver the world’s most resilient and secure post-trade infrastructure for our clients,” said Dan Thieke, Managing Director, Business Risk & Resilience Management.

Given the collaborative nature of the firm’s resilience initiatives, DTCC will be conducting a broad external outreach program to its clients and other key stakeholders to validate and refine its plans. The white paper is a key part of that engagement and is intended to foster further dialogue and discussion on this critical topic.