The UK Financial Services Authority has published a new document which provides a summary of feedback that was received when the Tripartite Authorities consulted with the profession about the results of last year’s Resilience Benchmarking Project.

The feedback concerns five key questions:
• How resilient is the financial sector in the face of major operational disruption?
• How quickly can the financial sector recover in the event of a major operational disruption?
• Do firms plan and prepare effectively?
• Are there any dependencies or concentrations that could be potential areas of vulnerability?
• What are the cost benefit implications of the recommendations made in the Resilience Benchmarking Project discussion paper?
A substantial appendix to the document provides a draft ‘Business Continuity Management Practice Guide’. This aims to aims to help infrastructure providers and regulated firms in their business continuity planning by identifying and sharing examples of business continuity practice observed in firms that participated in the benchmarking exercise.

The Business Continuity Management Practice Guide “has been designed as a flexible tool that firms can use to inform and support their business continuity planning as they see fit. Consequently firms should not view it as a definitive checklist of steps to take, but rather as a tool to stimulate their thinking by providing a framework for developing and reviewing their own business continuity arrangements.”

The FSA will publish a final version of the guide on the FSA website, but is inviting feedback before this stage. The deadline for this is 25th August 2006 and the final version will be published in October 2006.

Read the feedback document and draft Business Continuity Management Practice Guide here.

•Date: 6th July 2006• Region: UK •Type: Article •Topic: Financial sector
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