When I speak to financial leaders, the theme that comes up again and again is availability. Networks and services must stay online because in a regulated industry like banking, even short outages carry real consequences for customers and compliance.
During the past two years, nine top UK banks and building societies have experienced at least 803 hours of unplanned tech and systems outages, the equivalent of almost 33 days.1 Each of these incidents carry financial costs, scrutiny from regulators and long-term impact on customer trust. It shows just how unforgiving the environment is when availability fails.
That’s why resilience has to be engineered into the very architecture of systems. Designing out single points of failure. Embedding security at every layer. Proactively managing latency and performance. Building in the ability to recover quickly if something does go wrong. And just as importantly, managing those services in a way that assures availability every day.
Of course, no system can prevent every disruption. What matters is how well you’re prepared to respond.
That’s why scenario planning is so powerful. By running through severe but plausible events, a cyber incident, a cloud outage, a supplier failure, teams can strengthen their ability to act and turn uncertainty into a test they’ve already rehearsed. It’s also an opportunity to check that response plans stay aligned with regulatory expectations and data sovereignty requirements.
For me, this is where resilience becomes confidence. Customers, regulators and employees all feel that when disruption comes, the organisation is ready.
In my experience, resilience comes down to two essentials: how services are managed, and how people are enabled to respond. You need both working together.
At BT, we focus on management frameworks that give financial services the confidence their services will remain available even under pressure. That means the ability to monitor environments proactively, to detect issues before they impact customers, and to take preventative measures that reduce risk.
If something does go wrong, rapid diagnostics and intelligent toolsets can act quickly and minimise downtime. Increasingly, we’re also using networks built for intelligence to take this further, self-healing capabilities that can open capacity where it’s needed, block emerging threats or adjust performance in real time.
Resilience also relies on people having the visibility, the trust and the governance to act. When teams feel confident in the information in front of them, and clear about the decisions they can make, they move faster. That speed can be the difference between a minor issue and a major outage.
Resilience doesn’t stop at the edge of your own organisation. It’s strengthened by the ecosystem you’re connected to. BT works closely with the world’s leading technology partners and cloud providers to make integration seamless. Our digital orchestration layer and Operational Fabric ecosystem mean new services, hyperscalers and third-party platforms can be brought in quickly, without complex onboarding or risk to compliance.
For me, this is what ‘resilient by design’ looks like in practice. Not just infrastructure that’s built to withstand disruption, but service management that continually assures resilience day after day.
How BT helps build resilience by design
At BT, our resilient finance proposition is built around this philosophy. We help financial services embed resilience into their operations by combining modernised infrastructure with intelligent service management, proactive monitoring and compliance by design.
- Agility through automation: change delivered faster and safer, with less complexity
- Preparedness through testing: frameworks to rehearse disruption and prove resilience to regulators
- Confidence through observability: visibility across systems to detect and address issues early
- Strength through governance: managed services that keep resilience assured every day.
Looking ahead
The financial services industry is under constant pressure to evolve; from the adoption of AI, to the shift to cloud, to ever-tighter regulatory expectations. Resilience by design is how financial organisations can keep pace with that change.
It’s about making availability a given. It’s about building agility into processes so change happens without added risk. It’s about rehearsing disruption, so responses are confident and decisive. It’s about management frameworks that assure resilience every single day.
89% of customers say they would leave a provider after a data breach. That’s why resilience isn’t just about avoiding disruption. It’s about protecting trust, enabling innovation and creating the freedom to grow. That’s exactly what we’re helping our customers achieve.
Why BT for financial services
For decades, we’ve helped the UK’s largest and most complex financial institutions, including 9 of the top 10 banks, build the strong, secure networks they rely on today. Behind the scenes, thousands of security experts and global operations centres work around the clock to stay ahead of threats and regulations, so you can stay focused on your business. As one of the world’s most certified managed service providers, we’re here with the skills and flexibility to help you keep moving forward.
