How a major retail and investment bank brought its teams together to keep customers moving, even on a bad day
This is a people story before it's a technology story. As a people-first organisation, that's how we approach work like this, and it's why it worked. A major UK bank needed to meet the regulator's Operational Resilience rules: proving its most important services could keep running for customers even when something broke. We could have led with tooling. We chose three ideas instead. People-first, because the answer had to be built with the teams, not handed to them. Execution Integrity, because the work had to stand up to a regulator, an auditor and the next team to inherit it. And Behaviour Execution Risk Management (BER), because the honest truth about resilience is that most failures are about behaviour long before they are about technology.
Starting there is what moved the numbers. Recovery times came down by 160 hours, a 44% improvement year on year. Incidents dropped by 429 a month, down 8% year on year. Multiple monitoring tools were pulled into a single end-to-end view of the customer journey, and the resilience review playbook we built was adopted right across the wider group. Behind those headlines sat the scale of it: 11 UK Important Business Services, 100 customer journeys and 246 risks mapped, 93 SME workshops, and 11 executive resilience reports. Here's how we got there.
