Operational Resilience for Financial Services
When disruption strikes a financial institution, four questions must be answered at decision speed: what is impacted, what happens next, what is the financial exposure, and what should be prioritized. Fusion’s Enterprise Resilience Decision System is purpose-built to answer them, with the service-and-dependency model, dependency intelligence, and recovery optimization that 185 financial institutions worldwide rely on to meet DORA, PRA, and other regulatory mandates.
185 financial institutions worldwide — across banking, capital markets, and insurance — rely on Fusion for enterprise resilience
Named Best Solution for Operational Resilience 2025
Helping over 400 customers operating across more than 100 countries
Winner of Most Innovative OpRes / BC Initiative 2025
What Does Operational Resilience in Financial Services Look Like?
Operational resilience in financial services is a financial institution’s demonstrated ability to prevent, adapt to, respond to, recover from, and learn from operational disruptions while maintaining critical business services within defined impact tolerances. Whereas traditional business continuity management addressed recovery only after disruption, operational resilience requires financial institutions to identify their most critical services, map every dependency that supports them, and prove through scenario testing that those services can be maintained within the tolerances set by regulators. In the EU, this means DORA, in the UK, this means PRA, and in the US, this translates to federal prudential regulators.
The Four Questions Financial Services Leaders Must Answer at Decision Speed
When a critical ICT third-party fails, a cyber incident cascades, or a payments outage tests recovery procedures, most financial institutions cannot answer the questions regulators and boards expect answered in minutes, not hours. Fusion answers each of them from a continuously curated service-and-dependency model — not from a static plan document.
What is impacted?
Which critical business services are affected. Which trading, payment, custody, or settlement operations are at risk. Which regulated impact tolerances are already threatened.
What happens next?
Which systems will degrade second and third. Which third-party concentrations will cascade. Where the second-order impact lands across business lines, geographies, and shared services.
What is the financial exposure?
The revenue, regulatory capital, and customer-harm cost per hour of disruption. The penalty exposure if impact tolerances are breached. The capital cost of a slow recovery versus a validated one.
What should we prioritize?
Which services to restore first to maintain minimum viable operations. How to sequence recovery under real resource constraints. How to satisfy regulatory recovery obligations while protecting customer continuity.
Connect to Any Underlying Business System with Fusion’s Platform
Get a complete, continuous view of your business services and products. Leverage a complete set of automation tools. Request a free demo to see how Fusion can transform your program and support operational resilience in financial institutions.
Fusion’s Approach to Financial Services Resilience
Four steps map directly to the four questions. Each is powered by the same continuously curated service-and-dependency model — every dependency validated, every capability claim traceable to data your regulators can inspect.
Expose
What is impacted?
Identify disruption exposure and third-party dependency risk across every critical business service, technology asset, and vendor concentration.
Quantify
What is the financial exposure?
Link operational dependency chains to financial impact thresholds. Convert operational risk into capital-allocation and regulatory-defensibility language your CFO and board recognize.
Model
What happens next?
Simulate the cascading impact of ICT and third-party provider failures, technology outages, and market disruption events against your validated service-and-dependency model.
Optimize
What should we prioritize?
Determine which critical business services to restore first, in what sequence, and under which constraints — to stay within impact tolerance and meet regulatory recovery obligations.
The Financial Services Regulatory Regime Map
Fusion covers the resilience requirements of every major financial services regulatory regime in scope for global institutions. Where your firm operates across jurisdictions, one platform can carry the evidence burden across all of them.
| Regime | Region | Core Resilience Mandate | Testing Expectation | Third-party Oversight | Penalty Exposure |
| DORA | EU | ICT risk management across five pillars; impact tolerances for critical services | Annual advanced testing; TLPT for significant entities | Article 28 contractual provisions; register of information; critical ICT third-party provider designation | Up to 1% of daily global turnover |
| PRA / FCA | UK | Important Business Services; impact tolerance; severe-but-plausible scenario testing | Regular scenario testing against impact tolerances | Outsourcing and third-party risk under SS2/21 | Enforcement action and formal supervisory intervention |
| FFIEC / OCC / FRB | US | Sound operational resilience practices; interagency guidance on third-party relationships | Exercise programs proportionate to systemic importance | 2023 interagency third-party risk management guidance | Consent orders; capital and remediation requirements |
| OSFI E-21 | Canada | Operational resilience and operational risk management | Scenario testing across critical operations | Third-party risk management guideline B-10 | Supervisory intervention and formal directives |
| APRA CPS 230 | Australia | Operational risk management and business continuity for critical operations | Tolerance-based scenario testing | Service provider management requirements | Supervisory action under prudential standards |
| MAS TRM / BCM | Singapore | Technology risk management and business continuity guidelines | Scenario testing including cyber scenarios | Outsourcing risk management guidelines | Supervisory action; potential impact on financial holding company status |
Scenario Testing That Regulators Recognize
Regulators no longer accept a single tabletop exercise as proof of resilience. Fusion’s Scenario Testing generates severe-but-plausible scenarios from your own operating model and runs them at scale against your validated dependencies.
- Generate scenarios from your live service-and-dependency model — not from a generic library
- Run thousands of variants to find tolerance breaches before events do
- Produce defensible testing evidence for DORA, PRA, OSFI, and APRA examinations
- Track improvement over time across every critical business service
Explore Scenario Testing
Case Study
We didn’t buy into Fusion because it was a cool new product that only a few of us would use. We needed the buy-in of our business continuity champions, our vendors, and our third-party risk owners.
Finastra
Why Decision Speed Matters in Financial Services
4%
of organizations demonstrate full operational resilience today.
Source: Accenture Resilience Index
50%
of the total cost of a disruption comes from delay-driven loss — decisions not made fast enough.
Source: IBM / Ponemon
60–90 min
is the industry benchmark for manually reconstructing a service-and-dependency picture during a live incident.
Fusion analysis; benchmark-aligned
FAQs
Under DORA, financial institutions must identify and map their critical ICT services and the dependencies that support them, set and test recovery against defined tolerances, conduct annual advanced testing (including threat-led penetration testing for significant entities), and register all critical ICT third-party providers with their national competent authority. Article 28 requires that contracts with critical ICT third-party providers include specific resilience provisions. Non-compliance can result in fines up to 1% of daily global turnover.
Operational resilience software for financial services supports compliance by automating the three hardest capabilities: mapping every critical service to its underlying dependencies (ICT, third parties, processes, facilities); simulating disruption scenarios to test recovery within defined impact tolerances; and sequencing recovery decisions to minimize tolerance breaches when a real disruption occurs. Without software, these activities rely on manually maintained spreadsheets and fragmented team coordination, producing evidence that is point-in-time and difficult to defend under regulatory scrutiny.
Business continuity management (BCM) focuses on recovering business functions after a disruption has occurred, typically through pre-planned response procedures. Operational resilience, as defined by DORA and the UK PRA, requires financial institutions to prevent disruptions from breaching defined impact tolerances, and to demonstrate that capability through scenario testing, not just recovery planning. Operational resilience is outcome-focused (think: Can the service be maintained?), while traditional BCM is process-focused (think: Does a recovery plan exist?). Modern resilience programs require both, unified in a single platform.
A DORA-compliant business continuity plan for financial services must go beyond static documentation. It requires a continuously curated mapping of critical business services and their ICT dependencies, scenario-tested evidence that services can be recovered within the institution’s defined impact tolerances, and third-party risk provisions that account for ICT concentration risk. Fusion builds these capabilities on a service-and-dependency model that is updated continuously, so that when regulators request evidence, it reflects current operational reality, not a snapshot from the last annual review.
Make Resilience Real
The time is now to improve operational resilience for financial services. Discover how you can meet regulatory requirements, minimize risk, and remain ready for anything.