PROJECT TITLE
Business Continuity Plan for Financial Institutions
ABSTRACT
Due to increase in customers’ demand, competition, 24hrs continuous service, frequent changes in regulatory policy requirements and changes in various threats landscape have put some pressures on financial institution to bring up a robust and comprehensive contingency plans that assured the continuity of their services.
This paper outlines the relevance of business continuity plan to financial institutions. This project will highlight the stakeholder’s involvement in the development of the plan, the understanding of the plan and how often the plan will be tested.
INTRODUCTION
Financial organizations could confront the disruption of major services due to attacks such as natural disasters like floods, earthquake, or fire. Disruption of services could come because of hacktivist attacks, servers, and networks problems. Because all these reasons, financial institutions need to develop a comprehensive business continuity plans that guarantees quick recovery of business after a disaster.
A single occurrence of a disaster can results in greater financial losses, erode investors and customers confidence and damaging of corporate image. Such an act can also lead to serious legal issues and litigations.
A well designed, implemented and tested contingency plan is the best assurance to protect against financial losses to any organization (Moore, 1995). There is a need for financial organizations to have an effective Business Continuity Plan (BCP) that ensure quick business resumption and limit losses in the event of services disruptions.
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEMS
Financial institutions are susceptible to different types of services disruptions stated in the introduction above, which could adversely impact the organization. In today’s world, Business Continuity Management (BCM) is becoming increasingly important. This research work will highlight the relevance of Business Continuity Planning to financial institutions and analyses the disaster preparedness of financial institutions to major disasters and disruptions by examining the Business Continuity Management policies, standards, and practices. It will go further to test the awareness and readiness of the stakeholders.
Objective of the study
This research work will highlight the importance of Business Continuity Planning to Financial Institutions.
Scope of the study
This study will be limited to BCP development for financial institutions only. It will cover the following key areas
· Business Continuity Plan Process
o Identification of key business areas.
o Identification of critical functions.
o Identify dependencies between various business areas and functions.
o Determine acceptable downtime for each critical function.
o Create a plan to maintain operations.
· Components of Business Continuity Plan:
o Business Impact Analysis
o Disaster Recovery Plan
o Disaster Recovery Plan and Tabletop test.
· Challenges with implementing Business Continuity Plan
· Summary