Operational Resilience in Financial Services: An Integrated Risk, Control, and Analytics Framework

Abstract

Operational resilience has moved from an operational-risk sub-discipline to a supervisory priority for financial services, driven by regulatory instruments that require firms to identify important business services, set impact tolerances, and demonstrate the capacity to remain within those tolerances through severe but plausible disruption. Yet the concept is often implemented as a compliance mapping exercise that is loosely coupled from the risk, control, and analytics machinery that firms already operate. This paper proposes the Integrated Resilience, Control and Analytics (IRCA) framework, a conceptual architecture that binds the outcome-based logic of operational resilience to the diagnostic logic of enterprise risk and internal control and to the evidentiary logic of operational analytics. The framework is organised around six interacting dimensions: important business services, impact tolerances, risk and control mapping, analytics and monitoring, testing and scenario exploration, and governance. We argue that resilience should be treated not as the absence of failure but as a measurable, testable service-level property, and that analytics provides the connective tissue that converts static control assessments into continuous evidence of resilience. Drawing on the operational-resilience principles of the Basel Committee, the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority, on enterprise-risk and internal-control literature, on resilience engineering, and on established practice in operational risk analytics, we describe the framework, present a supporting reference table and figure, and illustrate its use through a payments-service scenario. We discuss implementation challenges including data fragmentation, tolerance calibration, third-party dependency, and cultural constraints, and outline a research agenda spanning metric standardisation, causal analytics, and resilience-aware control design. The contribution is conceptual and integrative rather than empirical.