The UK government has announced it is to add data centres to its list of critical national infrastructure, providing them with additional support in the event of cyber attacks or other emergencies. Chris Biddick, Managing Director, Transfer Agency of Bravura considers how this is just the start of how important resilience and reliability are in our ‘always on’ digital world.
It is not just cyber threats the government has in mind. Extreme weather can also be disruptive. When London suffered a 40-degree heat wave in the summer of 2022, it wasn’t just frazzled commuters that blew a fuse. Data centres shut down because cooling systems failed. Two major cloud servers went offline.
It’s clear firms need the right contingency plans in place. Just like when Covid first struck, many firms were not ready to make the shift to home-working. Fortunately, tech firms like ours were. It seems that flexibility goes hand-in-hand with reliability.
Seven million account holders and counting
At Bravura, we have always put operational resilience at the centre of what we do. When your technology powers four of the five leading global custodians – plus big pension providers, wealth managers and insurers – you have to take these things seriously, to put it mildly. In all, more than seven million account holders around the world rely on our technology.
Now Europe’s regulators are on the case. The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA for short) comes into force next January. Its semi-cloned UK equivalent, driven by the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority, follows in March.
Our part in all this will be to help our clients do their ‘vulnerability mapping ‘ – working out where their networks and suppliers might pose a weakness.
Personally, I celebrate the fact that ‘operational resilience’ is now centre-stage. It needs to be.
It’s vital that a firm’s clients can trust their provider is robust and has implemented high levels of security and backup protocols. Whether it’s active monitoring to keep our clients’ connectivity as new systems are deployed or enabling them to remove frictions by optimising internal workflows. We are always fully committed to our clients – it’s in our DNA.
Automation and connectivity reducing risk, opening up opportunity
Our operational resilience underpins our clients’ resilience. But there are broader aspects to risk reduction, too.
The funds ecosystem needs intelligent forms of automation to compete and meet the changing needs of today’s investors. This is why we are focused on enabling the industry to have one connection to all their fund network partners while being able to turn complex internal business systems and manual activities into one efficient and automated workflow.
Connectivity is just as important. Keeping our clients fully connected to their counterparties is a key part of what we do. Our financial messaging platform, Babel, is effectively a network of networks. It integrates with all industry-standard networks and supports any messaging format.
The end state is a digitised TA that enables new investment products that deliver the outcomes investors are demanding. A DLT-based system could really be the panacea yet it is still some way off. Delivery is one stage, adoption and widespread trust are another. Firms that can enable here and now as well as support the staged pathway into a future that continually removes friction with double-digit percent savings are not always easy to find.
Fortunately, our Babel and Ochestrator solutions do just that. Whether you want one point of access to every funds network or to optimise your business model by connecting complex people processes and systems, we are enabling firms to take that step into the future in a risk-managed and controlled way.
Perhaps most excitingly we are playing a major role in helping our clients transition to the new world of digital assets. While DLT may still be some way off, investors, fund firms and asset servicers want to know they are optimally set up to manage the transition. That means systems that can integrate their DLT solution to the core of their business – such as Bravura’s Orchestrator.
We are on the cusp of a new age, yet stepping into the future will always require a partner, with proven solutions that lead to a long-term solution.
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