A backbone of any country’s economy is banking, financial services and Insurance Sector (BFSI). It’s one of the fastest growing industries in every developing country, and in India with the government FDI norms and special packages the industry has seen new startups to foreign & domestic tie up’s. Given the volume and key domain, its very important to have a regulatory board.
That brings pressure on industry or every institute to bring a better service or new ways to collaborate,integrate ..where technology plays the most critical role to deliver that outcome. Secondary with technology adoption, Innovation and our population the volume of transactions in its various forms reaches billions, you talk about UPI, Net Banking, Inter/Intra etc… the nos are growing and expectation or availability of services is getting very critical. Fintech domain becomes a key priority (India has the fastest FinTech adaption vs global average).
In above, I covered domain, growth, volume, technology and with this there also comes a side of protection, regulation, risk, availability for consumer/service providers both…Every larger,expanding industry needs a regulatory board , hence came Reserve Bank of India (RBI) the oldest followed by SEBI,IRDAI.
A quick look back on why RBI was formed “The Reserve Bank of India was set up on the basis of the recommendations of the Hilton Young Commission. The Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934 (II of 1934) provides the statutory basis of the functioning of the Bank, which commenced operations on April 1, 1935.” This board helps set norms for the Industry at all levels taking into effect country,consumer as well the Industry benefit. Now, as things go Digital and Fintech becomes backbone to all, rising technology,servies,platform are heart of progress .. There are various forms of technology which supports it, and availability of services is utmost important considering all scenarios, so business continuity is one of the key discipline area which the regulatory wants Industry to focus and follow.
Given availability of services and business continuity as key disciplinary area mandated..lets dive a little.
Business continuity is to be captured at multiple levels from IT to an individual covering all 3 core industry pillars aspect People, Process and Technology (“PPT”). And to achieve this, very key for any BCP team to rightly review this 3 core areas from 7 aspects i.e Review, Risk assessment, Perform BIA, Build Strategy/ Plan, Create an Incident response plan, Plan drills to test , and communication.
With these 7 aspects, it gets further shaped with transformation or learning from each scenario or changing landscape, example the traditional disaster concern, followed by digitalisation transformation so technology had to be shaped, followed by pandemic which had to shape many areas/models across the levels of “PPT”, Cyber threat we got to see how secure as well plan a recovery post Cyber Incident and this continues. Organisations are going a level beyond too and like in a recent conversation with few banks they want scenarios on pull the plug or zero RTO/RPO, continuous assessment/drift, zero touch DR, switch and perform in middle of daily transaction until end of day,super app and availability of data across all platform. With this scenarios and learning, I see many organisations have matured, many are going through that journey and new ways of business continuity model like Near DR,Far DR or Data Protection beyond backups to recover even from a Cyber Incident are coming into existence.
The Regulatory board further helps to see these matured plays are adapted by BFSI Industry.
At Kyndryl, Resiliency has been one of the key services expertise, having a strong advisory and consulting team doing BIA, Risk assessment, DC Build for near or Far DR, migration and then acquiring Sanovi technologies (acquired during IBM GTS days) for Automation and Orchestration now called as Kyndryl Resiliency Orchestration has taken the product to larger world with enhancement and integration into hybrid,multi cloud environment. Allowing lowest RTO/RPO Kyndryl Resiliency Orchestration for DR,Cyber Incident Recovery and beyond .. A Cyber Resiliency suite!
The journey continues to get better and stronger for our customers and deliver complex scenarios across “PPT”. A workforce of 10000+ under Resiliency pillar from Advisory, Consulting to manage services.
It’s important to look at all levels of “PPT” and make every pillar strong vs only IT, a disaster strikes at any pillar and the strongest of all sustains, grows. An applause to RBI team towards growth of BFSI.
Views expressed by: Harish Soni, Resiliency and Security Practice Leader, Kyndryl.
