Resilience Beyond Compliance – Building Trust in a Digital Society

Welcome back to the tech blog, this time I will delve into a topic that often hides in plain sight, the difference between being compliant and being truly resilient.

In cybersecurity, particularly within financial services, it is tempting to view regulation and compliance frameworks as the finish line. Passing audits, producing evidence, and checking the right boxes creates a sense of safety. But if recent years have taught us anything, it is that compliance is the floor, not the ceiling.

The Compliance Paradox

Compliance matters. It sets a baseline, ensures accountability, and provides a shared language between regulators, institutions, and customers. Yet compliance is static by design, while the threat landscape is anything but static. Criminals and hostile actors do not wait for audit cycles. They move quickly, they experiment with new tools such as artificial intelligence, and they probe weaknesses across complex supply chains. This creates the compliance paradox, an organization can be fully compliant on paper, yet critically vulnerable in practice.

Resilience as the True North

This is why I believe resilience must be our true north. Resilience is not the absence of incidents, but the ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt, and recover when disruptions occur. It ensures that critical services remain available, trust is preserved, and recovery is swift.

Resilience is also about preparing for shifts that are difficult to predict but impossible to ignore. Considering the eventual arrival of quantum computing, today’s encryption standards could one day be broken overnight. No one can say when that moment will come, but resilience means preparing before it does, so that the foundations of digital trust remain intact.

Beyond Checklists

Moving from compliance to resilience requires a change in mindset. Resilience is not a document or a report, but a living capability. It means testing ourselves continuously, not to satisfy regulators but to learn where we are strong and where we must improve. It means that incident response is not a theoretical exercise but a practiced reflex, allowing teams to act with speed and clarity when it matters most. It means cultivating a security culture where people understand that their decisions under stress matter as much as firewalls or encryption keys. And it also means recognizing that no organization stands alone. Our suppliers, partners, and service providers are part of the same chain of trust, and we are only as resilient as their weakest link.

The Business Case for Resilience

Some see resilience as a cost. I see it as an enabler. In a digital economy, trust is fragile. A single outage, breach, or fraud event can erode decades of reputation in hours. Customers no longer ask only whether institutions are compliant, they want confidence that we can sustain trust even under pressure. Regulators and investors alike are beginning to look at resilience as the ultimate measure of maturity.

Strong resilience also creates room for innovation. When we build on secure and resilient foundations, we can embrace cloud, explore AI-driven services, and deliver new digital solutions with confidence. Resilience shifts the conversation from restriction to empowerment.

SEB’s Perspective

At SEB, resilience is not a defensive shield but a proactive enabler of trust. We are embedding resilience into the design of our systems from the start, rather than bolting it on afterwards. We continuously test and challenge ourselves, because we know the real world will do so regardless. And we invest in collaboration, both within SEB and across our partners, regulators, and customers, because resilience is never built in isolation. This reflects our mission, to enable financial confidence and trust in a digital society.

Closing Reflection

In summary, compliance is essential, but it is only the beginning. The institutions that will thrive are those that embed resilience into their DNA, not as a checklist but as a living, evolving capability. At SEB, we are committed to that future. For me, resilience is not about merely surviving the next incident; it is about ensuring that our customers, our partners, and our society can continue to move forward with confidence, no matter what challenges lie ahead.

Ulf Larsson, SEB Group Security CTO