News Release
The Cross-Market Operational Resilience Group (CMORG) yesterday (8 October 2026) completed its biennial simulation exercise, known as SIMEX26, focused this year on a global cloud services disruption.
The group – chaired by the Bank of England (the Bank) and UK Finance, with participation from HM Treasury, the Financial Conduct Authority and the wider financial sector – met to undertake a wide-ranging crisis management exercise, with the 38 largest and most systemically important banks and market infrastructure operators involved.
The exercise, which was opened by the Economic Secretary to the Treasury and hosted by the London Stock Exchange Group, involved firms working alongside the financial authorities to respond to a scenario focusing on global disruption to cloud-based services.
It also included a live meeting of the Bank-chaired Cross Market Business Continuity Group, which provides strategic direction to the sector’s collective response to systemic incidents. The Bank now expects firms to take action based on the exercise to further strengthen their resilience and ability to respond to severe operational and cyber scenarios.
Katharine Braddick, Deputy Governor of Prudential Regulation at the Bank of England and CEO of the Prudential Regulation Authority said:
"This was an important demonstration of the UK financial sector's commitment to operational resilience. The level of collaboration reflects the priority firms place on maintaining critical services in the face of disruption. That preparedness is essential to safeguarding financial stability."
David Postings, Chief Executive of UK Finance, said:
“Maintaining resilience across the financial sector is critical to supporting confidence, stability, and growth in the UK economy. SIMEX 2026 enabled us to collectively strengthen preparedness and ensure the sector is better equipped to respond to significant disruptive events while continuing to deliver essential services to customers.”
Economic Secretary to the Treasury Lucy Rigby said:
“The operational resilience of our world-leading financial services sector is core to maintaining financial stability.
“I’m grateful to all participants in SIMEX26 as we look to collectively enhance our defences against disruption, and safeguard stability and confidence.”
The SIMEX programme supports the financial sector’s operational resilience by rehearsing the response to the most challenging scenarios. Previous exercises, including those in 2022 and 2024, considered cyber-attacks against a major bank, as well as critical infrastructure disruption outside the financial sector.
SIMEX 26 builds on work done by the Bank of England, working in collaboration with the financial authorities and industry through CMORG, to boost operational resilience in financial services. In recent months, this has included strengthening third party engagement and resilience, enabling secure innovation in response to AI and other emerging technologies, and enhancing cyber preparedness, response and recovery for the most severe disruption scenarios.
Notes to editors
1. SIMEX 26 and CMORG’s wider programme to develop financial sector capabilities supports the aims of both financial authorities and firms to ensure collective response tools are in place to respond to disruptive events. This improves the operational resilience of the financial sector and promotes a stable financial system that the public can depend on.
2. CMORG enhances the operational resilience of the UK financial sector through collective action, and is supported by specialist industry groups. It achieves this through the identification of systemic risks, the development of solutions to support sector-wide mitigation strategies and sharing capabilities and knowledge across the sector.
3. As part of this work, CMORG oversees the approach for sector-wide response to systemic incidents through the Sector Response Framework (SRF). The SRF is a key component exercised through SIMEX to ensure the UK’s financial services industry is ready to respond effectively and in a coordinated manner to severe disruption.
4. The scenario was not informed by any specific threat information but was developed alongside a range of industry experts.