Financial services operational resilience
Exercise Counterparty
- Client
- A professional association of chiefs of staff
- Format
- Demonstration exercise, about 15 participants
- Sector
- Corporate · Critical infrastructure
01The situation
Operational resilience cannot be demonstrated by having a plan alone. Organisations need to understand whether their people, processes and dependencies continue to function when normal assumptions fail.
02The brief
Counterparty is designed to support CPS 230-aligned operational resilience and business continuity testing. It exercises continuity arrangements, tests critical operations against agreed tolerance levels and examines dependencies on counterparties and material service providers.
It also tests executive escalation and decision rights, rehearses regulator, customer and stakeholder communications, and looks for the vulnerabilities written plans may not expose.
What was tested
- Business continuity
- Critical operations
- Third-party dependencies
- Executive decision-making
- Escalation pathways
- Stakeholder communications
03How it ran
Counterparty begins with the disruption of a critical external dependency and progressively introduces operational, financial and reputational consequences. Participants must determine which operations to protect, when to escalate, how contingency arrangements should be activated and how the organisation communicates as uncertainty grows.
Foresight captures decisions and communications throughout the exercise, creating an evidence base for the debrief and showing where plans, responsibilities or controls need further testing.
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Request a briefing
Which decisions does your team need to practise?
Every scenario here can be adapted to your organisation, or we can build one around the situation you are most concerned about.