What impact would a tornado have on your bank? How about a processor outage? Do you know how long your customers would be blocked from completing transactions? Or how much revenue your bank might lose?

Knowing the answers to these questions can help your organization prepare for and respond to the unexpected. Organizations typically codify this information in a business impact analysis (BIA).

A BIA means precisely what it says — it’s an investigation into what impact any negative, disruptive event could have on your workforce, customers and institution. Information in a BIA may be needed for regulators during examinations, or from underwriters providing cyber liability insurance. Both want to see that your bank is prepared for the unexpected and can respond appropriately.

The Biggest Advantage of a BIA

What are your most critical business functions? If hampered or halted, what processes would bring your operations to a standstill? And what will that mean (in the short and long term) for your bank or financial institution?

By conducting a BIA, your team will gain a thorough understanding of various disruptions and their potential impacts on your institution. With that understanding, your team can improve how those processes are protected, especially those most critical to your bank and your customers.

What To Expect From a Business Impact Analysis

Perhaps you’ve been mandated to conduct a business impact analysis. Maybe an incident has spurred you to be better prepared in the future. Or, maybe you just want your bank or financial firm to be the best it can be — robust and ready to weather any storm.

Conducting a business impact analysis involves the following:

• Identifying Critical Business Functions: This involves recognizing all the key business processes and functions that are essential for your organization’s operations. These may include customer service, production, sales, IT infrastructure, supply chain management and more.
• Assessing Potential Risks and Threats: This component includes identifying and analyzing potential risks that could disrupt your organization’s operations. These threats include things like natural disasters (earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, etc.), technological failures, cyber attacks, pandemics and supply chain disruptions.
• Determining Impact Scenarios: Organizations need to assess the potential impacts of different disruptive events on their critical business functions. This includes analyzing possible financial, operational, reputational and regulatory impacts of each scenario.
• Quantifying Impact: This measures potential losses and impacts associated with each identified scenario. It may include estimating financial losses, operational downtimes, loss of productivity, reputational damage, regulatory fines and more.
• Setting Recovery Objectives: You’ll need to establish recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) for each critical business function. RTO defines the maximum tolerable downtime for each function, while RPO states the maximum tolerable data loss.
• Identifying Dependencies and Interdependencies: Organizations should identify dependencies between different business functions and processes, as well as dependencies on external vendors, suppliers and partners. This will prove essential in developing effective recovery strategies.
• Developing Mitigation and Recovery Strategies: Based on the BIA’s findings, ImageQuest can also help you develop mitigation and recovery strategies to minimize the impact of disruptions. These business continuity strategies may include implementing redundancy measures, backup systems, alternate suppliers, disaster recovery plans, etc.
• Documenting the BIA Report: Finally, all findings and recommendations from the BIA will be documented in a comprehensive roll-up report. Your BIA report provides the risk intelligence needed for developing effective business continuity plans, disaster recovery plans and risk management strategies.

By aligning all the components of your business impact analysis with your organization’s goals, you will better define your threat universe and operational vulnerabilities. It will also help you gain effective strategies to avoid or recover from whatever comes your way.

Enhance All Areas With a Business Impact Assessment

When you have a business impact analysis or assessment in place, every area of your business will be brought into the light. You’ll see potential risks that you hadn’t considered before, in areas such as:

• Risk Management: The BIA process will help you assess risks associated with various business functions and the potential impact on your institution should any of them be unavailable for any reason.
• Resource Allocation: Focusing on essential business functions will equip you to distribute resources more efficiently, and develop accurate budgets that produce results in areas important to your success.
• Continuity Planning: A BIA will give you a foundation for developing robust business continuity and disaster recovery plans. By understanding the potential impacts, you can create plans to ensure the continuity of operations and minimize downtime during disruptions.
• Decision-making: You’ll gain valuable insights that enable risk-informed decision-making, helping to minimize downtime and maximize resilience.
• Compliance: For industries with regulatory requirements, the BIA helps ensure compliance by providing the foundation for building a documented governance program that is process-enabled and auditable.

This probably sounds like a lot of work — and it is. We recommend you work with an experienced, qualified third party, such as ImageQuest, to develop your business impact analysis. But while extensive, you will see all your business operations in a new light. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of what processes directly and indirectly affect others. You’ll also learn how each may disrupt the various areas of your operations.

Looking for more insights into how you can help your bank, wealth management firm or financial institution weather any storm? Talk to ImageQuest about your institution’s business impact analysis needs today!