Financial firms toil to meet new EU rules on outsourcing

Negotiating right to audit vendors, including cloud providers, seen as toughest requirement

The brief of bank operational risk managers is changing rapidly. Where once they spent their days fretting about internal systems, now they face a galaxy of potential points of failure and back doors for cyber attackers across thousands of third-party service providers. And regulators have made it increasingly clear that banks cannot delegate responsibility without maintaining a strict level of oversight.

In its latest guidelines on outsourcing, the European Banking Authority (EBA) requires