In today’s digital-first financial landscape, resiliency engineering has become a strategic imperative for banks, insurers, and investment firms across EMEA and North America. As customer expectations for 24/7 access and seamless digital experiences intensify, and as regulatory bodies introduce ever-stricter operational resilience requirements, financial institutions must ensure their platforms are robust, agile, and compliant. At Publicis Sapient, we help financial organizations navigate this complex environment by embedding resiliency at the heart of their digital transformation journeys—leveraging advanced Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), chaos testing, and region-specific compliance frameworks.
Financial institutions face mounting pressures from both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK and EU, regulations such as the Bank of England’s Operational Resilience framework and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) guidelines demand that firms identify critical business services, set impact tolerances, and demonstrate the ability to remain within those tolerances during severe disruptions. In North America, the Federal Reserve, OCC, and other regulators are similarly focused on operational continuity, cyber resilience, and robust incident response.
These regulatory drivers are not just about compliance—they are about protecting customer trust, safeguarding market stability, and ensuring that financial services remain available even in the face of black swan events, cyber threats, or technology failures. The interconnectedness of modern financial platforms, powered by APIs, microservices, and cloud-native architectures, increases both the opportunity for innovation and the risk of cascading failures. Outages are no longer rare; they are a real and present risk with immediate financial and reputational consequences.
At Publicis Sapient, resiliency engineering is a foundational pillar of our digital transformation strategy for financial services. Our approach is built on three core elements:
SRE is the discipline of building and operating reliable, scalable software systems. We embed SRE principles throughout the development lifecycle, ensuring that reliability, availability, and performance are continuously measured and improved. Our teams implement robust monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks, providing real-time visibility into system health and enabling proactive issue detection and resolution. This approach has enabled clients to achieve 99%+ uptime SLAs and significant improvements in application performance and availability.
To ensure platforms can withstand real-world disruptions, we integrate chaos testing into our engineering lifecycle. By simulating failures—such as network outages, service degradations, or sudden demand spikes—we identify weaknesses and blind spots before they impact customers. Our proprietary Resiliency Maturity Model allows us to assess platforms holistically, from individual application components to critical downstream dependencies, and recommend targeted improvements. This proactive approach helps institutions avoid the costly outages that have plagued the industry in recent years.
Our teams are deeply experienced in interpreting and implementing region-specific regulatory mandates. We help clients embed disaster recovery, backup, and failover capabilities into their cloud-native environments, and automate compliance controls within CI/CD pipelines for continuous assurance. Whether aligning with UK, EU, or North American standards, we ensure that platforms not only meet but exceed compliance requirements, future-proofing businesses against evolving regulatory demands.
Nationwide, the world’s largest building society, partnered with Publicis Sapient to transform its technological foundation and ensure 24/7 availability of digital services. By developing the Speed Layer—a near real-time data streaming platform—Nationwide achieved 99.99% system availability, millisecond-level response times, and significant infrastructure cost savings. The solution decoupled legacy systems from customer-facing channels, enabling rapid innovation and robust operational continuity, even during major incidents or scheduled downtime.
A leading global investment firm modernized its mission-critical workloads from on-premises to AWS with Publicis Sapient’s guidance. The migration unlocked faster time-to-market, improved developer productivity, and enhanced application performance. By embedding SRE practices and robust monitoring, the firm achieved a 99% uptime SLA and a 75%+ improvement in application performance and availability across 48 countries—demonstrating the power of cloud-native resiliency engineering.
OSB Group, a major UK specialist lender, built a greenfield core banking platform with Publicis Sapient, leveraging cloud technology and composable architecture. The result: 90% straight-through processing, real-time customer insights, and expedited payments for 90% of customers within two hours. This modern, resilient platform positions OSB for future growth and regulatory compliance.
In a world where outages and disruptions are inevitable, the ability to recover quickly—and even prevent failures before they occur—becomes a key differentiator. Publicis Sapient’s resiliency engineering services empower financial institutions to mitigate operational, reputational, and regulatory risks; accelerate digital transformation with confidence; and deliver uninterrupted, high-quality experiences to customers.
By going beyond automation to engineer true operational continuity, we help our clients build trust, safeguard their reputation, and unlock new opportunities for growth in an unpredictable world. Ready to fortify your financial platforms? Connect with Publicis Sapient to learn how our resiliency engineering expertise can help you achieve operational continuity and thrive in the digital age.