The Commonwealth of the Bahamas is subject to hurricanes and island wide electrical outages. Business could face critical operational disruptions due to natural disasters, island-wide electrical outages, faulty inter-bank electronic linkages and computer problems, acts of terrorism and system failures, hence the need to secure business continuity by formulating action plans in advance to ensure quick recovery.
The quick recovery of business functions after disruptions is therefore crucial to maintaining public confidence. Failing which, may impair the ability to provide service to clients and honor obligations, which may result in significant financial losses and potentially lead to a contagion effect on the financial system. Business Continuity Management is a comprehensive approach that includes policies, procedures and standards for ensuring that specified operations can be maintained or recovered in a timely fashion in the event of a disruption and by extension, ensures that the functionality of the financial system as a whole is preserved.
An important tangible evidence that an institution has embraced BCM is the formulation of an effective and workable Business Continuity Plan (“BCP”) . The resilience of a financial system to major operational disruptions will be determined by the robustness of the BCPs and the choice of a well tested Disaster Recovery Facility.