Statements of Work – An Agile approach to IT consulting
Specialist IT consultants undoubtedly deliver significant value to their customers. Indeed, many IT projects in the UK would simply not be possible without the specific technical know-how provided by external experts. Despite this, informal criticism of the way...
Beware the Taxman! New IR35 rules will impact IT consulting in financial services
For many years, UK financial services companies have been able to benefit from a large pool of highly-skilled technical IT specialists that can be engaged on a project basis, as needs arise. Most of these independent professionals have operated through their own...
Decoupling critical financial services from unreliable IT systems
The UK Government (Treasury Committee) has recently published (October 2019) its report, ‘IT failures in the Financial Services Sector’. This report criticises both the banks, for an unacceptable level of service outages resulting from IT failures, and the regulators (BoE, FCA, PRA) for not properly enforcing accountability for these failures. This is understandable, given the risks that banking...
PRA Pressure – New guidelines for banks on the resilience of financial services
In it’s recent discussion paper ‘Building the UK financial sector’s operational resilience’ the PRA sets out its guidelines for UK financial services businesses to achieve the required level of service resilience. This discussion paper, which is likely to form the...