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Mitigating supply chain risk is second nature to most financial services firms and building societies, whether that’s through diversification, stress testing, or regular monitoring and auditing. Yet too often, it has been curiously absent when it comes to essential regulatory communications.  
 
Last year, a firm managing communications for many of the leading consumer financial services groups in the UK went into administration. Insufficient supply chain resilience resulted in customers stepping in financially to ensure that presses didn’t stop on critical customer communications. The events showed in stark relief the importance of supply chain resilience, and sparked some major debate. 
 
Clearly, there are lessons to be learned to ensure that such a situation doesn’t arise again. So, how do we build supply chain resilience for critical building society customer communication? 
 
Operational resilience through transformation 
 
Supply chain resilience is mission critical for building societies and the wider consumer financial services market. This has always been the case, but even more so since the advent of Consumer Duty.  
 
Building strength in depth, different ways of working and communicating with customers, and robust disaster recovery plans are all essential to building this operational resilience. For many, ambitious ‘digital transformation’ plans are part of the solution, particularly if they can deliver the data connections to rapidly shift channels in the event of a major change or shock.  
 
This isn’t wrong, but simply buying and rolling out the tech for digital transformation is the easy bit. These technologies offer only the possibility of efficiency gains and resilience, not guarantees.  
 
Getting digital transformation right 
 
According to McKinsey,  when large organisations undertake major transformation projects, they fail roughly 70% of the time. There are plenty of reasons these efforts falter. But with digital transformation, projects often fall down when companies try to make digital leaps that are too much, too soon, or fail to integrate new solutions across the tech stack.  
 
Now more than ever, customer expectations and requirements are shifting all the time. Understandably, businesses are looking to keep up with new digital solutions. However, when technology stacks have been built up organically over time, they often include disparate legacy systems that don’t integrate efficiently, which result in fragmented workflows and data loss.  
 
And, from a supply chain resilience point of view, these fragmented systems can limit agility and speed of response if and when you need to channel shift quickly.  
 
To deliver digital solutions that are truly fit for purpose, and which can strengthen your operational resilience over the long term, it may be worth looking at digital transformation from the ground up. A digital transformation project to upgrade legacy systems and consolidate technical infrastructure can boost operational efficiency, deliver the digital experiences demanded by customers and, crucially, boost operational resilience.  
 
What should digital transformation deliver to improve resilience? 
 
At Paragon, we focus on designing workflows that allow for the efficient transfer of information throughout a business. This involves improving access to data, modernising legacy processes and strengthening security. Key factors that can improve resilience include:  
 
Consolidated systems: A single point of access that integrates legacy technologies can accelerate digital transformation and build in agility and speed of response when channel shifting is required.  
 
Full transparency and centralised control: With a single view of communications, different departments and regions can all react in real time to changing market conditions and events. Centralised management, meanwhile, delivers improved control of brand, content and compliance.  
 
Enhanced data accessibility and disaster recovery: Data stored securely in the cloud allows for 24/7 access. Accessible through stringent security controls, operations can get back up and running fast in the event of an outage.  
 
Recent events have taught us that supply chain resilience across the sector hasn’t been as strong as we once thought. For all of us, greater attention has turned to how we manage the strength of communication supply chains, and how we mitigate the risk. By working in tandem, building societies and their communication partners can embark on the transformation journeys required to deliver a new level of resilience.  

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