Harper James advises ambitious businesses on the laws of England and Wales, including the governance, commercial contracts and regulatory controls that support operational resilience. For a regulated business, resilience means maintaining important services through disruption, not simply recovering systems after an incident.
UK financial services firms must identify important business services, set impact tolerances, map the people, processes, technology, facilities and third parties supporting them, and test severe but plausible disruption scenarios. FCA and PRA expectations place responsibility with the board and senior management. Recent developments also include closer oversight of critical third parties and increasing focus on cyber risk, concentration risk, cloud providers and supply-chain dependency. Businesses with EU operations or regulated entities must also assess the effect of DORA, which has applied since January 2025.
A practical starting point is a resilience register covering each important service, its maximum tolerable disruption, key dependencies, accountable owner and evidence from testing. Further reading on operational resilience can help boards compare regulatory expectations and build a structured programme. The register should connect directly to incident response plans, outsourcing records, business continuity arrangements and customer communications.
Legal and operational teams should review outsourcing and SaaS agreements for service levels, audit rights, incident notification, access to data, subcontracting controls, exit assistance and business continuity obligations. They should also check whether liability caps, termination rights and governing law match the risk of an interruption. A data protection impact assessment, cyber insurance review and supplier due diligence process add separate controls, but none replaces regular testing.
The board should receive clear evidence rather than a policy document alone: test results, unresolved gaps, remediation owners, supplier dependencies and decisions requiring funding. Harper James can support this work through commercial contract reviews, data protection advice, financial services regulatory guidance, dispute planning and governance support. The immediate next step is to select one important business service, map its full delivery chain, test a realistic failure scenario and record the decisions that follow.