IA Fintech Member Insights: Apvera

Whether your business is small or large, it takes time and an expert to understand all the nuances and relationships between corporate procedures and regulatory standards. At first, it might seem that regulatory standards impede innovation and corporate growth, but these regulations can actually help businesses stay more resilient to an ever-changing cybersecurity environment.

Flexibility and Experience-Led Approach

With more experience, an organization can become more resilient based on their cybersecurity maturity and understanding of the way corporations leverage IT for their own benefit. Even with new and budding firms, regulations still apply, and violations can be costly. It’s these reasons that experience in necessary regulations is imperative for resilience for both large and small firms.

A baseline standard is the first step in defining regulations that can be fulfilled across all firm types and sizes. A less developed firm might have a simple continuity and disaster recovery plan. More established firms have integrated standards into monitoring, business operational procedures, and third-party applications. Currently, only large financial institutions such as retail banks have the maturity for optimized resilience with rigorous testing and accountability for all stakeholders.

A common factor in every approach is the ability for each institution to implement the right standards and stay compliant. Regulatory standards should allow firms to stay fluid across all operational resilient platforms and systems. This includes providing the right direction and methodologies that an organization’s IT staff can follow.

International Coordination

Regulatory standards are country specific, but they involve a cooperation component that provides operational resilience. Cooperation crosses country boundaries in case of a national event that could cripple service and productivity. For instance, during the 9/11 terror incident in 2001, international banks were still able to provide service and process customer transactions because of interoperability between New York and London.

Global regulations help financial firms stay compliant when they expand into other countries that might have different standards than the current one. It’s cooperation that also ensures customer data and financial information is protected regardless of any international event that would otherwise affect business operations.

In addition to international cooperation, many large banking firms have a presence in common cities such as the London. UK is one of the leaders in regulatory standards to protect user data, and this country is a trusted source for many of today’s regulations that lead to better operational resilience. However, it’s just as important for UK regulators to consider that its services many of the world’s global financial institutions and regulations should be flexible while still maintaining trust and protection of consumer data.

Recommendations for Regulation and Supervision

It’s important for both regulation makers and industries affected by standards to stay vigilantly involved with the way they are introduced and designed. Some recommendations include:

• Continue to take a leading role in ensuring compliance with global regulatory standards
• Provide organizations with absolute clarity on how to govern and manage operational resilience where there are already existing initiatives that overlap
• Increase supervisory capabilities by expanding skills and experience

Please get in touch with us for more information.