Across five very different sessions at Risk Live Europe, one message kept resurfacing. Risk events no longer move at the speed of your governance. The event convened chief risk officers, geopolitical strategists, and treasury leaders from top financial institutions who weren't debating whether their frameworks were sound. They were asking whether those frameworks were fast enough, and the resounding conclusion was that they are not. Instant payment rails settle in ten seconds

Operational Resilience is Becoming an Ecosystem Visibility Problem At this year’s Operational Risk & Resilience in Financial Services event in Amsterdam, one message surfaced repeatedly across panels, roundtables, and private conversations: Operational resilience is becoming an ecosystem intelligence problem. Firms are no longer struggling simply with governance, documentation, or regulatory compliance.They are struggling to maintain visibility across increasingly interconnec

When the cyber incident involving Stryker became public, the immediate focus was on disruption. Stryker, a major global medical device manufacturer and a critical supplier to hospitals and healthcare providers, operates at the center of a highly interconnected ecosystem. Any interruption at that position carries consequences that extend far beyond the company itself. The implications were immediate and multi-dimensional. Operational systems were affected. Response costs escal

For decades, the global banking sector has operated under a simple, increasingly fragile mantra: Know Your Supplier (KYS). For Chief Risk Officers (CROs) and Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) functions, KYS has served as the foundation of operational resilience, anchored in due diligence, SOC 2 audits, and contractual safeguards designed to ensure that any entity touching bank systems is vetted, verified, and compliant. But today’s risk environment no longer behaves in linea

Why observable exposure—not internal assurance—is becoming the new standard of risk governance A Shift Hiding in Plain Sight When JPMorgan was fined by the European Central Bank for prudential misreporting, the most important detail was not the size of the penalty, nor even the underlying error. It was the regulator’s conclusion: the firm’s internal systems had failed to detect discrepancies that were externally visible across multiple reporting cycles. For 15 consecutive qua

Regulators, investors, and risk leaders now expect real-time, evidence-based assurance In the traditional architecture of financial institutions, Internal Audit (IA) was often viewed as the "rear-view mirror," verifying compliance long after risks had been taken. As global markets face unprecedented complexity, shifting geopolitical dynamics, and the rapid ascent of AI, that model is breaking. It is time for IA to evolve. Internal Audit is no longer a retrospective control fu

Third-party risk no longer stops at named vendors. As dependencies extend into fourth and fifth parties, hidden concentration and interdependency risks drive outsized losses. TPRM leaders need forward-looking visibility across the full ecosystem—before small disruptions become systemic failures.

Alaska Airlines has experienced two major flight groundings this year due to IT system failures—an illustration of how operational disruptions now carry far greater regulatory and financial consequences under DORA. Alaska Airlines is not an isolated example. Many high-profile outages and supply-chain breaches have demonstrated the urgency of DORA’s requirements for end-to-end ICT governance, incident response, and third-party oversight across the financial ecosystem: The 2018

After engaging with risk leaders at six global forums across three continents, one theme stands out: new forms of risk are emerging almost daily — and tariffs are among the most consequential. Across G-SIBs and leading institutions, the uncertainty introduced by evolving trade policies has become a persistent source of financial and operational stress. Automotive sector: U.S. tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico have disrupted integrated production chains, amplifying cr