The anchor premise of my remarks last year was an appeal for greater technological diversity in our third level resiliency and security schemes, representing an impregnable firebreak, and a platform for recovery, should the core of an infrastructure become corrupted. This work complements our traditional focus on geographic dispersion of infrastructure and human capital, but recognizes a fundamental distinction between cyber resiliency and traditional resiliency: what works for us in conventional resiliency scenarios, namely the automatic and instantaneous replication of data, works against us in cyber scenarios, reflecting risks that a pernicious malware, or a severe data corruption, or even an application failure propagates itself across primary, secondary, and tertiary operating sites, rendering a systemic infrastructure functionally inoperable. Examples of technological diversity may take many forms, from the application code to 1/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  middleware components to the operating platform, and may canvass physical, distributed, hosted, or cloud-based solutions. Reflecting their unique circumstances and assessments of the threat, financial market infrastructures will likely respond differently to the present challenge. Without prescribing any particular solution, I will merely suggest that in the event of severe disruption efforts to enhance technological diversity represent an infrastructure’s best chance to achieve the two hour recovery objective promulgated by the Committee on Payment and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) and the Board of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO).

Members of the SIFMA Government Operations Committee and the Wholesale Securities Customer Advisory Group have consistently expressed their desire for this enhancement, which reflects an important opportunity for customers to realize value from the modernized Fedwire Securities platform. Strategy 2 seeks to provide customers with greater and more flexible access to Fedwire Securities Service data to support reconciliation, perform analytics, enhance risk management reporting, and project liquidity needs. Strategy 3 seeks to improve credit and liquidity risk management tools available to depository institutions and the Reserve Banks to manage and control daylight overdrafts that derive from the delivery-versus-payment nature of the Fedwire Securities Service. Strategy 4 seeks to examine the costs and benefits of expanded operating hours for the Fedwire Securities Service, reflecting an increasingly global world in which financial institutions and their customers conduct transactions at all hours across multiple jurisdictions. Many stakeholders have suggested that expanded hours will enhance the ability of financial institutions to mobilize collateral in domestic and international markets and provide participants with better access to liquidity, especially during periods of stress, recognizing that we serve as central securities depository for the largest, deepest, and most liquid pool of collateral in the world. While these prospective benefits must be assessed against potential costs, and require more comprehensive study across a wide range of stakeholders before any commitment can be made, the time to assess an expansion in operating hours for the Fedwire Securities Service has come.