GPRC for Operational Risk in Financial Services
Orchestrating Stability, Trust, and Execution Integrity on the Most Pressurized Deck of the Enterprise
There are few industries where the consequences of failure arrive as quickly — and as publicly — as they do in financial services.
A manufacturing firm can experience a production disruption and recover over days. A retailer can absorb a supply chain breakdown and shift to alternative routes. A technology company can endure downtime and lose revenue while rebuilding confidence. In each case, disruption is serious. But in financial services, disruption is different. It is immediate, highly visible, and often systemic. Because in banking, capital markets, and insurance, operations are not simply something that supports the business — operations are the business. The product is execution. The brand is reliability. The currency is trust.
That is why operational risk has always been present in this industry, even before the industry formally named it, built governance around it, staffed it, quantified it, and surrounded it with frameworks. And yet, for all of the maturity in operational risk programs across the sector, many institutions are still navigating with instruments that were built for a world that no longer exists. They have risk registers, RCSAs, KRIs, operational loss databases, controls testing, issues management, audits, third-party assessments, and incident playbooks — and these are all important. But too often, they remain separate artifacts, living in parallel systems, managed by different teams, interpreted through different lenses, and reported upward in different formats.
Which creates a dangerous illusion: that because the organization has operational risk components, it therefore has operational risk capability. But capability requires something more. Capability requires orchestration.
Why Operational Risk in Financial Services Is Different
The simplest way to frame . . .
[The rest of this blog can be read on the Corporater blog, where GRC 20/20’s Michael Rasmussen is a Guest Blogger]