The RRP Challenge: How far have you progressed?

Recovery and resolution planning (RRP) - yet more valuable resource diverted to compliance? Or can it be a source of deep structural understanding and competitive differentiation?

To date, some 39 separate financial institutions have been the subject of EBA stipulations to comply and provide an RRP by the end of the year. With first deadlines looming, institutions must ask searching questions and overcome challenges in the following key areas:

1. Certainty: Defining and creating the RRP
2. Preparation: Getting ready for smooth and predictable implementation (should this ever prove necessary)
3. Reality-alignment: Realising this is ‘more than documentation’
4. Future-proofing: Adopting an approach capable of being updated as circumstances change and, crucially, one that defines a structure optimised to avoid any actual implementation in the future
5. Strategic and commercial awareness: Leveraging all the opportunities, making RRP preparation a source of real competitive advantage as well as compliance

Financial institutions must now look at RRP implications and preparations. Rather than approaching this as a ‘compliance exercise’, it can be beneficial to look at RRP as a source of deep structural insight, future-proofing and competitive advantage.

The optimum RRP can be defined as one that never has to be executed; through using clear early warning indicators and effective mitigating actions. But its real and enduring legacy should be the improved organisational, operational and commercial shape it brings to the institution.

One fact is certain. No matter how each affected institution is approaching RRP, and no matter what stage of preparation they have reached today, the clock is ticking.

Where are you on your journey to RRP readiness? And what have you learned from the process?