Beyond measures to enhance technological diversity in our core infrastructure, we continue to make meaningful progress developing manual contingency procedures in the event of a protracted wholesale service disruption from which we cannot recover on a same day basis, our best efforts to ensure resiliency notwithstanding. Recognizing the constraints on operating capacity in such a scenario, this work seeks to maintain critical functionality and to identify and support systemically important payments in our transaction flow to mitigate customer and market impacts. Increasingly, this work extends beyond the Federal Reserve to include infrastructure peers and other systemically important market participants to test our protracted outage hypotheses and manual contingency procedures. It also complements a number of industry initiatives, including the work of the Payments Risk Committee and the newly established Financial Systemic Analysis and Resilience Center, to consider systemic risk mitigants in the event of a major outage of a large payments processing financial institution. Notwithstanding progress advancing these important initiatives, and in recognition of their enormous complexity, the message for policy makers, boards of directors, and senior management of systemically important institutions is to invest sufficiently in resiliency and security such that we never find ourselves reliant on manual contingency measures whose invocation is likely to produce profound, and unpredictable, consequences. One sphere of resiliency that has grown in prominence for payment and market infrastructures over the past year has been the focus on endpoint security, a theme that has also captured the attention of global policy makers.
Richard Dzina: Advancing the Fed's wholesale services in an era of unprecedented challenge and change Remarks by Mr Richard Dzina, Executive Vice President of the Financial Services Group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association's Operations Conference and Exhibition 2017, Boca Raton, Florida, 9 May 2017. * * * Thank you and good morning. In leading the Federal Reserve’s wholesale services I am continually reminded that my stewardship responsibilities for this extraordinary business run in at least three directions. Organizationally, I am accountable to principals across the Federal Reserve System and to the Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Managerially, I am accountable to the men and women who make this business function, as capable and as dedicated a cadre of public servants as has served our nation anytime, anywhere. Operationally, and the sensation I feel most keenly standing before this audience of industry leaders, I am accountable to our depository institution customers, and their end users, which rely upon our services to send and receive time critical payments; to transfer, maintain, and provide safekeeping for Fedwire-eligible securities; and to settle positions derived from transactions in other markets. I’d like to thank SIFMA for the opportunity to participate in today’s program, and for the visceral reminder of accountability that comes with this invitation. I have long maintained that the Federal Reserve’s wholesale services represent the franchise when it comes to our nation’s financial market infrastructure.