Building societies and regulated mutuals face a resilience challenge that larger financial institutions don't. As a mutual, your purpose is member service. That ethos can work against you when disruption demands difficult choices about what to protect and what, temporarily, to let go.

Organisations that fail under severe disruption rarely do so because they lacked a plan. They fail because decisions about what must endure were implicit, inconsistent, and untested before the pressure arrived.

Reactive organisations have crisis plans. Adaptive ones have leadership that performs under pressure without the plan telling them what to do. Without that shift, decisions in disruption default to uncertainty, delay, or inconsistency.

The FCA and PRA expect Boards to demonstrate that their important business services are the right ones, properly sequenced, and genuinely survivable under severe but plausible scenarios. The MVC is how you answer that question with confidence rather than assumption.

We work with your senior leadership and Board to define and pressure-test your Minimum Viable Company across eight essentials of organisational viability: financial solvency, legal identity, member trust, core service continuity, workforce capability, technology and data access, regulatory standing, and governance authority.

The output is not a document that sits on a shelf. It is a shared, explicit understanding at Board level of what must survive, what must be sequenced, and how deliberate trade-offs are governed when normal operating conditions no longer apply.

The work typically includes:

• A structured, one-day scoping workshop that defines your MVC requirements and gives your leadership team a clear, credible starting point for the transition from reactive to adaptive.
• A facilitated Board workshop to surface assumptions, stress-test existing thinking, and reach a shared definition of the society's MVC.
• A gap analysis against your current Important Business Services framework, identifying where your resilience investment is protecting the right things and where it is not.
• Scenario testing against two or three severe but plausible disruption events relevant to your organisation, including third-party failure, cyber incident, and key person risk.
• A governance framework for MVC decision-making: who has authority, under what conditions, and how decisions are communicated to members and regulators.
• A short board-ready briefing document that captures the output and is suitable for use in your 2026 operational resilience submission.

We work exclusively with building societies, insurance companies, and regulated mutuals. We understand the mutual model and the particular pressures it places on resilience decisions. We don't approach this work with a generic framework retrofitted to your sector.

We are direct about what we find. Clients come to us because they want to know the truth about where they stand, not a managed version of it. In one engagement, our approach identified critical gaps that two other specialist organisations had reviewed and missed.

Our work helps Boards move from reactive crisis response to adaptive decision-making capability, so that when disruption occurs, leadership is prepared to act with clarity rather than rely on pre-defined plans.

The MVC white paper, published in January 2026, sets out our thinking in full. You can download it here.