LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE

Aside from preparedness, banks also have in place steps to hasten recovery in their operations following a natural disaster.

“To mitigate the impact of natural disasters on the operations of BDO branches and ensure continued bank operations and customer access to BDO products and services, the bank has assigned a buddy branch for each branch nationwide. This allows BDO employees of the affected branch to temporarily report to the buddy branch to service the transactions of clients of their branch affected by the natural disasters,” said BDO’s Mr. Tan.

In cases of prolonged occurrence of a calamity, “the bank implements this BCP from the time of the disaster until full recovery,” he said.

For DBP, it is important to establish a clear communications plan with its personnel and customers.

“Customers are made aware if products and services are already available despite the onset of a natural calamity. Likewise, alternatives are utilized lacking the availability of required resources. Personnel are trained to handle or undertake contingency measures in order to that business operations may be resumed soonest,” it said.

“In cases of a prolonged occurrence of the after-effects of a calamity, advisories and information regarding the status of the Bank’s services shall be immediately disseminated to clients, including updates if necessary.”

For BPI, Ms. Gayares said that the Bank has redundancies and backup facilities for the critical components of their operations, including business recovery sites located in strategic locations.

“[W]e also have cross-functional teams identified to manage potential disruptive events, emergency situations, or disasters. This ensures that our clients can go to any BPI branch to fulfill their transactions and other banking needs,” Ms. Gayares said.

Years of being exposed to different natural calamities, banks learned to improve its BCPs as well as their customer information management.

For one, DBP is requiring all of its business units to prepare, review, and update their BCPs to include the results of their tests and exercises as well as lessons learned from previous experiences in dealing with actual disasters. It has also created a “centralized management information system” in order to provide easy access to client information from one source.

In the case of BPI, it has reinforced its bank-wide “First Aid and Basic Life Support Training” for their personnel. “We have also strengthened the partnership with the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundation, which coordinates local support from the government and other response agencies,” BPI’s Ms. Gayares said.

Meanwhile, BDO’s Mr. Tan said that they review and update their BCPs “based on whether or not the recovery objectives are met.”

“The bank back-tests its BCP[s based on] an actual disruption… and continually improves its BCP[s through] enterprise test scenarios and awareness programs based on the severity and impact of an actual disaster,” he said. —