Full Story:
The Tripartite Authorities have launched what it terms a 'self help' package to assist financial firms in improving and strengthening business continuity. The package includes the final version of the Business Continuity Management Practice Guide which has been under development for some time and also includes ‘Benchmarking Lite’, which will show firms where there is scope to improve their business continuity arrangements.
The Business Continuity Management Practice Guide is broken down into five main sections entitled: Corporate Continuity; Corporate Crisis Management; Corporate Systems; Corporate Facilities; and Corporate People.
The Tripartite Authorities say that the Business Continuity Management Practice Guide ‘is not intended to be a comprehensive list of all the business continuity practices relevant to a financial firm. Therefore, the FSA does not expect firms to take a tick-box approach to using the Guide. Instead, firms are encouraged to take a pragmatic and sensible view of which aspects of the Guide are most useful and relevant for them’.
For a full copy of the report: See the Downloads Page
Benchmarking Lite
The Tripartite Authorities describe Benchmarking Lite as ‘a self assessment tool which firms can use to identify areas of relative strength and weakness in their own business continuity and crisis management arrangements, and receive feedback on how these might be improved.’ It is a reduced version of the full benchmarking questionnaire that was developed and refined in conjunction with firms that participated in the 2005 financial sector business continuity benchmarking exercise.
Firms must pay a fee of £2,000 to gain access to Benchmarking Lite, a subscription which runs through to March 2008.
More details at http://www.fsc.gov.uk/section.asp?catid=320&docid=1877
BenchmarkingLite is built using JRCPL’s Inoni benchmarking and business continuity measurement tool: see http://www.jrcpl.com/
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