• Customers expect seamless 24/7 digital banking service
• System overloads and vendor failures now rival cyber threats
• Legacy systems struggle during transaction spikes
• Operational resilience determines brand trust and market standing
• AI‑driven observability helps catch issues early
• Business continuity must become integrated, live, and tested
• Vendor management needs clear resilience clauses and monitoring
• Cloud infrastructure must support redundancy and failover
• Chaos engineering helps prepare systems for real stress
• Boards must own resilience as strategic equity

A loss of digital resilience and failures by third parties pose as big a threat to retail banks as cybersecurity, a leading digital transformation expert as warned.

Speaking at a recent finance summit, Shilpa Doreswamy, Retail Banking Sector Director at GFT told delegate that operational resilience is quietly emerging as the backbone of trust that financial institutions can’t afford to ignore.

While cyber‑security continues to dominate headlines, Doreswamy urged banks to ensure that digital and TPRM resilience encompassed much more than IT systems and firewalls. 

“System overloads during peak transaction periods create severe bottlenecks that can leave customers locked out of their accounts,” she said, noting that outdated legacy systems often buckle under pressure.

The rapid integration of cloud services, artificial intelligence, and open banking APIs is helping with innovation – but according to Doreswamy, it's also weaving a fragile web of service interdependencies.

A failure at any single layer can cascade through the system, potentially affecting everything from identity verification to fraud detection.

Traditional business‑continuity plans assume discrete, localized disruptions, but these are no longer adequate for the digital era, Doreswamy explained, adding that services, data, and infrastructure span geographies and time zones.

Recent outages at major UK banks offer a glimpse into this new reality – delays in salary payments or frozen card transactions quickly erode customer trust and invite regulatory attention.

The GFT Banking Disruption Index reveals that more than a third of UK customers list IT reliability among their top reasons for choosing a bank.

For institutions, this elevates resilience from back‑office concern to public‑facing reputation issue – arguably even the core of their brand identity.

A truly resilient bank tackles risk in a proactive, integrated way. On the tech front, this means scalable platforms and real‑time system observability, often powered by AI, that can detect and respond to anomalies before they escalate.

It also mandates treating business continuity as a dynamic, company‑wide discipline rather than a regulatory checkbox.

Vendor management must carry the same weight – strong onboarding standards, clear contractual resilience clauses, and active partner monitoring are essential.

Doreswamy emphasized that resilience must be embedded into change‑management itself. Whether rolling out new features, integrating a vendor, or upgrading systems, every initiative demands protective measures to guard against disruption.

She added that training employees to respond swiftly to incidents should be a universal priority – a cross‑functional expectation, not confined to IT or risk teams.

Another emerging trend is resilience by design. Banks should view resilience not as a reaction but as a proactive architectural principle. Modernizing legacy infrastructure is key to reducing technical debt.

Deployments in the cloud must be built for geographic redundancy and seamless failover. AI and automation tools can help models detect early indicators of failure and trigger rapid response procedures.

And, Doreswamy suggests, chaos engineering – deliberately stress‑testing systems under duress – must become a standard operating practice to maintain trust during crises.

These measures shouldn’t be one‑off projects. Instead, resilience must become part of the organizational DNA, shared across divisions and embedded in daily operations.

“Resilience must be owned at the highest levels,” Doreswamy asserted, urging boards and executives to invest in systems, processes, and people.

She described resilience as more than technical shielding, casting it as strategic equity in a world where reliability equals reputation.