Apr 13, 2022

April 12, 2022 Following upcoming changes to the Financial Conduct Authority‘s (FCA’s) regulations, StarLeaf, the enterprise communications failover service for business continuity and incident response, has launched a new version of its Standby product for banking and financial services companies. A failure of communications services can prove catastrophic to financial service organisations responsible for the livelihoods and assets of billions of people and businesses worldwide. That’s why the UK’s financial regulator, the FCA is set to mandate in March that any FCA-regulated business – from stockbrokers to banks, insurers, fintech startups or crypto specialists – must have a real-time comms failover system in place. StarLeaf Standby, the enterprise communications failover service, is designed to help organisations to manage effective incident response, maintain business-critical communications and achieve regulatory compliance. Built on the resilient StarLeaf platform, StarLeaf Standby offers a robust security and ISO/IEC 27001 certification. New regulations need a new response The new FCA regulations come amidst a backdrop of mounting risk for businesses across all industries, particularly those in banking and financial services. Though ransomware is often considered the main risk for financial institutions, with estimates suggesting ransomware attacks strike businesses every 11 seconds and the global damages related to cybercrime expected to reach $6trillion by the end of the year, in reality, the incidents that tend to bring down entire systems centre on human errors such as employees accessing data via insecure platforms. This has become an even greater problem since the onset of remote working with thousands of employees logging in to secure platforms from varied locations instead of the workplace. As well, not having real-time comms failover plans has further, more far-reaching implications, that move beyond just an individual business impact. If employees at home are forced to turn to less-secure, consumer-focused apps in the event of an enterprise communications platform going down to communicate and share sensitive information, they are putting the details of clients and customers at risk, while opening themselves up to leaks and potential legal action. It’s against this backdrop that means that FCA-regulated businesses will soon have to have failover measures in place that kick in as soon as an incident hits and which help these firms continue with business-as-usual as much as possible. Starleaf’s product addresses this issue by functioning as a secure out-of-band communication platform. Designed to integrate with platforms including Microsoft Teams, Zoom and WebEx, Standby ensures that banking and financial services won’t suffer from a minute of downtime, nor will their employees have to use insecure platforms to communicate. Mark Richer, chief executive officer, StarLeaf, says: “In the current climate of accelerated risk, incidents of any scale are an inevitability. At best this could be a minor service outage; at worst, a cyber breach or natural disaster which leaves systems compromised. Financial services organisations must urgently consider what the impact of such an incident would be if it rendered their primary virtual communications service unavailable. It is therefore only right that the financial regulatory authorities are looking to update their regulations for this very circumstance and our new Standby product is perfectly placed to both comply with these but also bolster an organisation’s overall business resilience too to ensure they can keep functioning and communicating, whatever may happen.” Author