“What keeps you up at night?”
That’s a question many of us at DTCC get asked. There is no finite answer to that question given that we deal with a myriad of challenges and opportunities. A few examples include: Cyber-attacks, geopolitical tensions - the list of threats is virtually unlimited.
For the past five decades, we’ve led the financial services industry through disasters and market disruption events, remaining operational during some of the most difficult periods of U.S. history. The volume spikes and circumstances driven by these events have challenged DTCC’s scale and performance, but ultimately our robust planning and business resilience helped protect the financial services industry.
Related: Explore the moments that made us throughout the past 50 years
The key word to point out here is: resilience.
Resilience doesn’t just refer to our technical capabilities, such as our data center strategy; it also means operationally, which is the ability to prevent, withstand and quickly recover from any type of disruptive event and to continue providing our critical business services.
I am the Managing Director, Head of First Line Resilience and Control at The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) supporting Clearing & Security Services. My team’s vision is to lead with a First Line operating model to support a dynamic business environment through collaboration and shared accountability for resilience across the three lines of defense. In this capacity, the team is responsible for DTCC’s Business Resilience efforts and the Office of Recovery & Resolution for our Clearing and Securities Services.
Our Strategic Approach
The nature of risk is always evolving so ensuring operational resilience is not a “set it and forget it” exercise. We are constantly reassessing our approach, reviewing and refining our strategy to ensure we have a robust program in place for potential disruptions.
Our overall strategy focuses on strengthening our current resiliency capabilities while making progress toward a modern, resilient architecture. With several components in place across DTCC to support our strategy, it enables opportunities to increase resilience, decrease risk and elevate the overall client experience.
Navigating Evolving Threats
The financial services industry is a deeply interconnected and complex system of interdependent components. That makes it an industry imperative to not only identify, monitor and manage interconnectedness risk, but to also create a network to share best practices and lessons learned.
Given DTCC’s focus on moving the financial markets forward, the Operational Resilience platform was created to outline the key practices, protocols and resources we leverage to mitigate risk and aptly respond to a disruptive event. As such, this platform will continue to be updated with FAQs, white papers and other client facing materials to help navigate the evolving threats facing the financial markets sector.
Improving resilience is a continuous journey that requires collaboration with our clients and partners to ultimately deliver the world’s most resilient and secure post-trade infrastructure. We will continue to plan and be ready to act if and when a disruption event occurs.
Learn more about our Operational Resilience protocols and practices here.