Lee Fredricks, Director Solutions Consulting, EMEA at PagerDuty
The financial services sector has never been more dependent on technology – or more vulnerable to failure. IT outages continue to pose serious challenges for operational resilience and regulatory compliance. Yet, these same disruptions may also present unique opportunities for learning and transformation. By tackling recurring obstacles and adopting forward-looking strategies, organisations can turn outages into catalysts for achieving operational excellence.
Defining Ownership Before the Alarms Sound
When an outage strikes, unclear ownership can magnify risk and prolong downtime. Without clear accountability, decisions are delayed, teams work at cross-purposes, and the risk of compliance breaches increases. With downtime costing financial organisations thousands per minute, preparation is non-negotiable.
Today’s regulatory environment makes clarity of ownership even more important. Frameworks such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the FCA/PRA operational resilience policies demand traceability and evidence of effective response structures. Establishing defined responsibilities, escalation paths and reporting processes, ensures that teams act decisively and consistently when incidents occur.
Strongly defined ownership not only speeds recovery but also demonstrates to regulators, customers, and partners that resilience is an integral part of the organisation’s DNA, and not just something referenced in documentation.
Streamlining Processes to Avoid Bottlenecks
Manual intervention is often the weakest link in incident response. Under pressure, teams can overlook steps, duplicate work or introduce errors that hinder recovery. Automating repetitive, error-prone tasks helps eliminate these issues by taking such tasks out of human hands.
Automated data capture and synchronisation across platforms such as Jira and ServiceNow creates a audit-ready record of actions taken. This transparency reduces administrative burden and supports continuous compliance. By streamlining workflows, financial institutions can assign teams to focus more on strategy, prevention and customer assurance – transforming incident management from a weakness into a strategic strength.
From Fragmented Visibility to Proactive Resilience
Many financial organisations still operate within a complex mix of legacy infrastructure and newer digital environments. This fragmentation can hinder the ability to respond quickly and effectively during outages, as responders struggle to maintain visibility across multiple systems and locate where the incident originated. Even with a range of monitoring tools in place, the flood of alerts can be overwhelming.
Consolidating monitoring data through intelligent alerting and orchestration solutions helps separate signal from noise. By unifying visibility across systems, teams can detect incidents more quickly, allocate the right expertise and act before the issue escalates.
Automation and AI take this even further – predicting vulnerabilities, streamlining diagnostics and enabling proactive interventions before the outages occur. Regular simulations (through Operational Resiliency Testing) and post-incident reviews reinforce readiness, helping businesses stay compliant whilst continuously improving their operations.
Creating an Automation Centre of Excellence
Automation works best when it’s coordinated across teams, not scattered. Establishing a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for automation ensures good governance, consistency and knowledge sharing. Within financial institutions this creates a foundation for sustainable scalability – allowing teams to innovate while maintaining clear guardrails. The result: an organisation that moves faster, works smarter and always remains audit ready.
Turning Knowledge into a Resilience Multiplier
Silos can often hinder progress, but when managed effectively, they become powerful knowledge networks. Cross-functional collaboration enables teams to share insights, refine incident response strategies and continuously strengthen operational best practices.
Automation and AI elevate this, by handling routine working, allowing teams to focus on deeper analysis and long-term improvements. Promoting this culture of shared learning not only strengthens internal capabilities but demonstrates to regulators that operational resilience is an ongoing commitment, not a one-time initiative.
Scaling Consistency with Automation and AI
Automation and AI now sit at the heart of operational resilience. Standardised automation reduces human error, while AI-driven operations allow teams to respond faster during incidents and with greater precision.
Machine learning models can correlate related incidents, ensuring alerts are automatically routed to the right team. Agentic AI and Automated workflows can act as virtual first responders, handling common recovery steps without human intervention. Generative AI enhances this – providing natural language assistance to drive down incident resolution times and by producing post-incident reports with actionable insights for audit and compliance reviews. These act as a framework for resilience that scales as operations grow more complex.
Maintaining Trust When an Outage Strikes
Customer trust is most at-risk during outages. During these times, communication matters just as much as technical recovery. Generative AI can quickly analyse incident data and generate clear, timely updates for customers and internal stakeholders. This transparent communication prevents misinformation, builds confidence and minimises reputational damage.
Automation further helps by reducing manual workload and allowing teams to focus on resolving high-priority issues and delivering a personalised experience to customers. Even in the face of disruption, customers expect responsiveness and reliability. This balance between technology and empathy ensures resilience beyond mere compliance – it protects reputation.
Ultimately, resilience isn’t just about withstanding disruption – it’s about using it to get stronger. The financial services industry has entered a new era where operational integrity and innovation are inseparable. Outages, whilst disruptive, can be the spark that drives transformation across systems, teams and culture.
To truly blunt the “Sword of Damocles” hanging over their operations, financial entities must now invest in automation, AI and intelligent operations platforms that turn insight into action. Those that do so won’t just stay compliant, but set the pace for the industry.
The opportunity lies in acting before disruption strikes – strengthening visibility, embedding automation and building a culture of ownership and accountability. Organisations that take this proactive approach will move beyond resilience towards sustained excellence, agility and trust. The further advantage lies in transforming disruption from a threat into a catalyst for lasting operational excellence – becoming a stronger and thus a more trusted service provider and business partner.
