Operational resilience – a strategic priority for the PRA and the Bank as a whole - has been tested in a way few business continuity plans could forsee, as Covid-19 has affected all our operations, processes and people. The insurance industry – all the people who work in it - responded extremely well to the operational challenges that have arisen from the Covid-19 pandemic. There are, of course, still challenges for all of us as we move from immediate crisis management to medium term sustainability. This includes reassessing the impact on cyber and other IT-related risks, whilst at the same time recognising the need for technologydriven solutions to support certain activities. There are a number of lessons that can be learnt on operational resilience from the Lockdown Phase:   Disaster recovery plans involving redundant office spaces simply did not work. This particularly affected the call centres and other functions that were not set up to work from a non-office environment.   There were shortages in the supply of technology built to corporate security standards to support working from home on a much larger scale than firms had generally envisaged in existing business continuity plans. 4  https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/prudential-regulation/publication/2018/solvency-2-matching-adjustment-ss https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/prudential-regulation/publication/2019/liquidity-risk-management-for-insurers 6 https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/prudential-regulation/publication/2019/solvency-ii-prudent-person-principle 5  7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  7    Firms did not uniformly have sufficient visibility of the operational and financial resilience of some of their key outsourcing service providers.

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