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Financial regulators revise Business Continuity Management booklet to stress to examiners the value of resilience to avoid disruptions to operations

ARLINGTON, VA (November 14, 2019) — The members of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) today emphasized that examiners understand how management of banks and other regulated entities, including depository financial institutions, nonbank financial institutions, bank holding companies, and third-party service providers, have prepared their operations to avoid disruptions and to recover services.

The updated Business Continuity Management booklet focuses on enterprise-wide approaches that address technology, business operations, testing, and communication strategies critical to the continuity of the business. The booklet describes principles and practices for information technology (IT) and operations designed to achieve safety and soundness, consumer financial protection, and compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and rules.

As the booklet makes clear, business continuity focuses on more than just the planning process to recover operations after an event. Business continuity also includes the continued maintenance of systems and controls for the resilience and continuity of operations. Business continuity is an integral part of the risk management life cycle of an entity’s systems, processes, and operations.

The Business Continuity Management booklet describes principles to help examiners determine whether management addresses risks related to the availability of critical financial products and services. The booklet uses common terms and builds on widely used standards to facilitate effective supervision. The updated examination procedures will also help examiners assess the adequacy of an entity’s overall business continuity management program.

The Business Continuity Management booklet is part of the FFIEC Information Technology Examination Handbook (IT Handbook) and replaces the Business Continuity Planning booklet issued in February 2015.

The IT Handbook is available at http://ithandbook.ffiec.gov/.


About FFIEC

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) was established on March 10, 1979, pursuant to title X of the Financial Institutions Regulatory and Interest Rate Control Act of 1978 (FIRA), Public Law 95-630. In 1989, title XI of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989 (FIRREA) established The Appraisal Subcommittee (ASC) within the Examination Council. The Council is a formal interagency body empowered to prescribe uniform principles, standards, and report forms for the federal examination of financial institutions by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (FRB), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and to make recommendations to promote uniformity in the supervision of financial institutions. To encourage the application of uniform examination principles and standards by the state and federal supervisory authorities, the Council established, in accordance with the requirement of the statute, the State Liaison Committee composed of five representatives of state supervisory agencies. In accordance with the Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act of 2006, a representative state regulator was added as a voting member of the Council in October 2006. The Council is responsible for developing uniform reporting systems for federally supervised financial institutions, their holding companies, and the nonfinancial institution subsidiaries of those institutions and holding companies. It conducts schools for examiners employed by the five federal member agencies represented on the Council and makes those schools available to employees of state agencies that supervise financial institutions. The Council was given additional statutory responsibilities by section 340 of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1980 to facilitate public access to data that depository institutions must disclose under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 (HMDA) and the aggregation of annual HMDA data, by census tract, for each metropolitan statistical area (MSA).

Contacts

FDIC
LaJuan Williams-Young
202-898-6993

FRB
Chelsea Grate
202-452-2955

OCC
Anne Edgecomb
202-649-6870

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