This policy brief explores the challenge of how to promote the cyber resilience of the global financial system through operational collaboration. It focuses on promoting the resilience both of individual financial institutions and the global financial system. Cyber resilience entails the ability to anticipate and prepare; withstand and recover; respond; and learn in the wake of disruptive events. Operational collaboration is a model for implementing a resilience-based approach. It goes beyond information-sharing, to incorporate meaningful, routine, institutionalized collaboration, where stakeholders work together on shared threats (Borghard, 2018; Maurer and Nelson, 2020). Collaboration is important due to the scope of the cyber threat to financial services; the interdependence of the system itself, such that an incident in one part could have cascading effects; and the diversity of stakeholders across the regulatory/supervisory, government and industry communities that play a role in the system’s resilience. However, these factors also present hurdles to collaboration—particularly the global nature of the challenge and the sometimes competing or imperfectly aligned nature of the actors involved. Therefore, the G20, including through the Financial Stability Board (FSB) established by the G20 in 2009, is uniquely positioned to play a key role in helping to surmount these hurdles and promote an operational collaboration approach.

While there is an emerging consensus across governmental organizations, regulatory entities, international bodies and industry that cyber resilience for financial institutions should be prioritized, gaps remain with respect to defining an overarching framework that can help drive the development of common standards and achieve agreement on prioritization and implementation. Given the diverse work that already exists on cyber resilience for the financial sector, this policy brief articulates a resilience framework based on the logic of operational collaboration to help foster consensus across diverse stakeholders and drive implementation of resilience approaches for financial services.