The Resilience Advantage Dinner: Key Themes and Insights

We recently had the privilege of bringing together a great group of senior leaders across operational resilience, finance, treasury and payments for dinner at Searcys at the Gherkin. There’s something about being 40 floors up at the Gherkin that makes you think differently. The evening views over London were stunning, but the best part was the conversation, no corporate speak, just real stories and reflections on what resilience actually looks like when the pressure’s on.

A huge thank you to AccessPay for partnering with us on the evening. It was a really good fit given payment processes are at the centre of financial services; payments is where trust, speed, and accuracy all come together. And as payments get faster and more connected, resilience and automation become absolutely critical. When pressure hits, it’s those systems and the people behind them that keep businesses moving.

A Personal Perspective on Resilience

So here is one of my perspectives. For every pound a business spends, there’s a trade-off to make: invest in customer growth, improve service, or reduce risk to build long term resilience (to name a few). The most resilient organisations are those that make these trade-offs consciously, balancing short-term gains with long-term sustainability.

But building resilience isn’t easy. I’ve seen this firsthand over the past 20 years, as businesses scale and add layers of hierarchy, the challenge grows. Chains of command get longer, communication slows, and legacy technology starts to show its limits. The ability to absorb shocks, and come out stronger on the other side, takes real intent and discipline.

The Growing Expectation Gap

The world outside work has trained us to expect more. We’re used to Amazon-level speed, Netflix-style personalisation, and everything working first time. So when things don’t, we notice, and we expect better. That expectation has (fortunately or unfortunately) shifted into the workplace.

So how do companies address this? We talked about resilience by design. It’s the only way to make sure we’re thinking about what’s needed early, not after something goes wrong. This does though need a change in approach e.g. building from the ground up so that a business can plan, flex, respond and recover effectively, not just react.

But resilience by design still involves trade-offs. None of us have infinite budgets or lots of capacity in our teams. The challenge becomes one of making the best decisions in front of us while still managing the risks we carry forward. It’s about knowing where to invest, what to accept, and how to adapt. We all agreed that resilience isn’t about doing everything, it’s about doing what matters most, well.

Key Themes from The Evening

Every business now runs on payments; they’re the engine room. The more transactions we process, the more connected and dependent those systems become. Many around the table had been through operational resilience programmes and agreed that payments still need more attention, not just to keep things running but to make sure they’re stable, secure, and ready for the unexpected.

Resilience here isn’t just about having backup plans. It’s about building real contingency and testing it properly. It’s not enough to have a plan that looks good on paper. You have to know it works when things go wrong. That naturally led into a great conversation about what-if analysis and scenario planning, and the need to think about the events that could genuinely stop a business in its tracks, not just where the impact tolerance sits.

A few other themes stood out:

1. Compliance as a consequence: For financial services firms, the regulatory deadline came and went earlier this year. For the firms that were most progressive, there was a sense that compliance to regulations is a consequence of the activities undertaken but its not the primary objective.
2. Different views on criticality: Even two companies doing almost the same thing can see the same service, platform or third party very differently. What’s critical for one might not be to another. It all depends on how the business is structured and what really matters to its customers.
3. Workarounds that actually work: Plans are one thing, but when pressure hits it’s the practical workarounds that make the difference. The simple, tested steps that people actually use in the moment are what keep businesses moving.
4. Don’t keep knowledge in one head: We’ve all seen it, the person who just knows what to do when things go wrong. There is a real need to identify key person dependencies before they have an operational impact e.g. off ill or have moved on to another role or company.
5. Keep it short and to the point: We’ve all seen the 100-page BCP but have we ever seen anyone ever read or apply it in a major incident / crisis? The organisations that respond best are the ones with clear, simple playbooks that tell people what to do next, not what to think about doing.
6. Resilience in M&A is hard: High growth businesses or ones which are undergoing M&A often find embedding resilience is hard. Different cultures can make it messy. The key is to build principles that scale and make sense everywhere, not a one-size-fits-all checklist.
7. Culture: This came up again and again. Strength comes from where people feel trusted to act, communicate openly, and learn from what happens. That’s what turns resilience from a policy into real muscle memory.
8. Depth of testing and exercising: Everyone recognised the importance of planning for failure but extending that planning into meaningful testing and exercising. This includes incorporating key third parties. This requires a shift from simple desktop-based testing to something more impactful without derailing live service.

Poetic Resilience Lessons

In recent weeks I’ve heard lots of sporting analogies which apply to the topic of resilience, the evening ended, however, with two unlikely poets: Rocky Balboa and Mike Tyson.

1. Rocky said, “It’s not about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.” This is at the heart of resilience. It’s not about avoiding getting hit, it’s about learning, adapting and coming back stronger every time.
2. Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Whether inside or outside of work, resilience isn’t tested when everything goes smoothly. It’s tested when things don’t go to plan, when you have to think fast, be clear and keep moving.

That’s what resilience really is, the ability to take the hits, steady yourself and keep going. When all said and done, people are always at the centre. How they think, how they act, and how they show up when it really counts.

Thanks to everyone who came along to the dinner. Your contributions were valued! If you’d like to join us for future events, please let us know!