Head of Operational Resilience

About the FCA

At the FCA, we’re creating a fair and more resilient financial system. We’re establishing more transparent relationships between financial services and customers, building trust in financial markets, and protecting vulnerable consumers.

We’re currently on an exciting journey as we drive forward significant organisational, people, process, and technology transformation to become a more forward-thinking, proactive regulator. We will use data more effectively to drive better regulatory decisions and build greater cohesion across our broad financial services remit. Significant improvements in digital enablement, business intelligence, market data and information management maturity are all being pursued to maintain our position as a world leader in financial services regulation.

The Role

Operational Resilience is a strategic priority for the FCA. The Head of Operational Resilience will be responsible for setting and delivering the 2-5-year strategy for resilience for all Divisions across the FCA that matures the operational resilience practices in the business and develops risk mitigation strategies for important business services.

They will be responsible for driving a resilience by design culture and influencing senior stakeholders pan FCA to make step changes in the resilience posture of their Important Business Services. Working closely with Directors as part of the business planning process, the HoD will support the prioritisation of initiatives that reduce the risk of disruption and improve operational excellence.

The Operational Resilience function will adopt a ‘Hub and Spoke’ model to ensure the ownership of resilience remains with the business. As such, the Head of Department will lead a small-medium team of experts who specialise in Crisis Management, Incident Response and Business Continuity, and who also have skills and expertise to engage closely with Technology Resilience, Cyber Security, Third Party Risk Management, Physical Security, Crisis Communications, HR workforce resilience as the additional enablers of resilience.

The key focus of the role is to drive and operationalise a consistent, effective and demonstrable approach to delivering resilient important business services, meeting the strategic priorities of the FCA.

This role will set the requirements for the 1st line capabilities and work closely with the 2nd line Risk and Compliance (R&CO) function to ensure the priorities of risk reduction initiatives continue to reduce the risk posture of the FCA. This role will act as a custodian for operational resilience and support the R&CO function to embed enterprise risk management practices.

This is a key senior leadership role focused on managing the resilience of our business, working to reduce risk through a period of significant change and developing plans to respond if disruption occurs in the business. The Head of Operational Resilience will report into the Operations Director and ensure the Operational Resilience Strategy and Plan contributes to the overall Operations strategy and FCA Business Plan.

Key responsibilities:

- Develop a clear vision, strategy, and roadmap to build the operational resilience capability of the organisation and the processes to prepare & respond to disruption and provide thought and operational leadership on resilience.
- Ensure the organisation can identify, assess, and maintain the appropriate level of resilience in all resources and supporting capabilities that underpin the FCA’s important business services, supporting key stakeholders/leaders across the business to raise awareness and drive the importance of operational resilience across the organisation.
- Work with Risk & Compliance to set an operational resilience policy and secure approval at Board level. Set and own operational resilience requirements and standards across Crisis Management & Incident Management, Business Continuity coordinating with the owners of Technology Resilience, Physical Security and Cyber Security.
- Establish, own, and run a Crisis Management Framework for the organisation which aligns with the Cyber Response & Recovery, Crisis Communications and IT Incident Management teams.
- Operationalise and embed the ongoing management of and attestation to Policy Statement 21/3 into the 1st Line of Defence (LoD) in a consistent manner.
- Co-ordinate the Divisional execution of all annual business continuity activities as per the defined timetable (incl. important business services review, prioritisation, mapping, scenario testing, impact tolerances and updating the self-assessment)
- Drive completion of Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and Business Continuity Planning (BCP) consistently across the 1st LoD functions ensuring resilience requirements are understood and can be met by dependant functions such as Technology, Estates and Supplier Management.
- Joining the Senior Leadership Team at the FCA during an exciting and challenging time of great chang