Financial services businesses need to improve cross-departmental communications to avoid digital disruption and ensure compliance with a new regulatory standard which comes into effect in July.
A new white paper, to be launched in Brisbane tonight (May 29), suggests a new approach to “interdisciplinary dialogue” to help organisations adhere to the new Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) standard, created in response to rising risks facing the sector.
Lead author Anna Huggins, from QUT’s School of Law, said the new Prudential Standard CPS 230 Operational Risk Management (CPS 230) aimed to ensure APRA-regulated entities were resilient to operational risks and disruptions.
In the paper, Professor Huggins and fellow authors Professor Mark Burdon, Imogen Forster and Professor Lizzie Coles-Kemp, state operational resilience is critical for financial services organisations facing increasing threats of disruption.
Professor Huggins said cyber incidents, technology failures, climate events and pandemics were all examples of recent events that threatened to disrupt the operations of important financial services.
“The CrowdStrike outage in July 2024 affected a historic 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices worldwide, bringing airports, healthcare services and banks to a halt,” the report notes.
“This event reinforces the need for firms to become more operationally resilient by effectively managing operational risks and maintaining critical operations during disruptions.”
Professor Huggins said digital compliance involves using technological solutions to enhance organisations’ regulatory compliance, which can help organisations to comply with the new standard.
“It requires stakeholders from different professional fields, including legal, risk and assurance, compliance and security teams, to work together effectively.”
She said a key challenge was improving communication between stakeholders from diverse professional backgrounds.
“This report proposes a novel interactive mapping approach to promote interdisciplinary dialogue about new strategies to promote digital compliance with CPS 230.”
Professor Huggins said the paper outlined an interactive mapping approach that was applied to a case study of Cisco and Splunk’s observability portfolio, which provides visibility across any technology stack and environment, including on-premises, hybrid and multi cloud, and harnesses real-time monitoring, insights and analytics across multiple IT and business domains.
The white paper, CPS Digital Compliance and Observability: An Interactive Mapping Approach, will be launched at an Innovation Central Brisbane Thought Leadership Event, at QUT’s Garden Point Campus tonight (May 29).
Register for free tickets to the event.
