Canary Wharf. Protected.

I had an enjoyable evening on Thursday with new clients, a major investment bank in Canary Wharf, where we attended a wrap party for the successful migration of their London voice services to the SmartNumbers cloud.  The project was delivered on time, on budget and without incident and now provides this leading investment house with significant organizational agility and resilience of their inbound voice.

Walking back through Canary Wharf, I was struck by two things.

Firstly, there seem to be clear signs everywhere that the financial services sector is slowly returning to life. Trading volumes are up, trading positions are being expanded and companies are selectively hiring again.  Dare I say it but Thursday night takings in the bars around the Wharf are returning to levels not seen for some time, which is certainly a sign of something though not entirely sure what.  Hopefully the sovereign debt crises will not cause too many drinks to be consumed in sorrow.

Secondly, as I look at the skyline of Canary Wharf dominated by those vast towers of financial durability – HSBC, Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Nomura – it strikes me that nearly all of the major finance houses in Canary Wharf are now in the process of adopting SmartNumbers for resilience and business continuity. It seems that one clear impact of the financial earthquake that so rocked this sector is the greater prioritization now given to risk and resilience across all aspects of their business. The mandate seems to be that department heads are driven to reduce risk in all aspects of their business, whether this is capital risk, operational risk or IT risk.  And that should give comfort to us all.

So, while Canary Wharf was already embracing SmartNumbers for resilience against pandemic planning (http://www.wharf.co.uk/2009/07/wharf-signs-up-to-swine-flu-co.html) the area seems to be in good shape to withstand any of the uncertainties that still surrounds this important sector.