Operational resilience of trading venues

The regulator found infrastructure broadly resilient but identified lessons for venues in mapping dependencies and testing resilience end-to-end across the supply chain. For compliance teams at trading venues and market infrastructure providers, this is a prompt to refresh critical dependency maps, challenge third-party concentration, validate incident response and recovery playbooks, and evidence scenario testing to senior management. Wholesale firms that rely on venues should also reassess contingency arrangements and third-party risk.

There are no new rules or deadlines in this publication, but firms should treat it as supervisory expectation-setting and align with the FCA’s operational resilience framework and March 2026 wholesale priorities. Actionable next steps: review incident and outage lessons; test cyber recovery and supply-chain failure scenarios; strengthen third-party oversight; document good practice; and ensure board-level reporting on resilience gaps and remediation. This thematic review is moderate impact: it does not introduce immediate compliance obligations, but weak follow-up could attract supervisory scrutiny and increase operational and reputational risk during market stress.