In the financial services industry, the slightest disruptions can cause costly losses, regulatory fines and long-term reputational damage.
If you’re managing risk and disaster preparedness for a financial institution, use the bank business continuity plan checklist below to ensure you’re adequately planning for every possible scenario.
Structuring a BCP for Financial Institutions
While there is no one-size-fits-all business continuity plan template for banks, the following checklist includes key areas that every plan should address. Further below, we explore each item in more depth:
Checklist: Bank Business Continuity Plan Components
1. Plan Objectives
Defining the scope of your plan is crucial because every financial institution has unique risks and continuity objectives. Include this information at the beginning of the BCP so that there are no questions about what it covers and what it doesn’t. For example, a single bank might have several plans intended for different business units and a master plan for the entire company. To avoid confusion, each document must identify its specific objectives.
The questions that you need to address in the objectives section include:
- What should the plan achieve?
- Is the plan relevant to all bank operations or specific departments such as IT?
- What is the core purpose of the plan?
- What, if any, are the limitations of the plan? Do you need additional planning documents?
2. Roles & Responsibilities
Your BCP must identify who oversees the organization’s continuity planning and disaster response. This section should outline the personnel who manage the planning, as well as those who must make key decisions at any stage of an operational disruption.
Your plan should identify:
- Who oversees the bank’s risk management strategies?
- Who manages the continuity planning and documentation?
- Who does the decision-making in an emergency situation?
- What are the mission-critical responsibilities of each executive and manager?
- What are the protocols for personnel in each department?
3. Risk Assessment
Every financial services organization must perform a comprehensive risk assessment that identifies all possible threats to their operations. These threats encompass everything from cyberattacks to electrical outages. Within the BCP, this section should clearly define each threat, its causes and its likelihood of occurring.
You can break down your risk assessment into these core questions:
- Which operational risks does the bank face?
- Which threats have the greatest likelihood?
- What are the causes of each threat?
- What are the circumstances or what does each disaster scenario actually look like?
4. Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
After identifying risks, the next step is to calculate how they will adversely affect the bank’s operations, particularly from a cost standpoint. This is referred to as a business impact analysis (BIA). Within the BCP, this analysis should define each operational disruption listed in the risk assessment, along with its impact on the bank, including an estimated length of an outage, potential financial losses per hour and associated effects on other aspects of the bank, such as customer-facing services.
Use these questions to guide your analysis:
- How does each threat disrupt the bank’s operations?
- What are the immediate and long-term impacts?
- How long do you anticipate each disruption will last?
- What is the cost, or how much money does the bank lose per hour in each scenario?
5. Prevention Strategies
Your bank business continuity plan can’t prevent every disaster, but it can greatly minimize the risks. Your plan should identify the steps you are already actively taking to prevent operational disruptions in a disaster. List disaster-specific scenarios, strategies and systems that you use to prevent such disruptions
Some of the key questions to answer in this section of your plan include:
- What technologies are in place to prevent cyberattacks?
- What systems are you using to block malicious files from entering the network?
- How adequate are your data backup and recovery systems?
- Are your bank branches built to withstand various natural disasters?
6. Disaster Response
The longer a bank is shut down, the worse the consequences. To keep downtime as short as possible, every bank disaster recovery plan must include the specific actions to take if operations are disrupted. This part of your BCP is referred to as “disaster response” because it lists the immediate steps that your organization takes following a disruption, helping to assess the situation and find the best path to recovery.
Your disaster response should address these concerns:
- How will you evaluate disruptions to determine what already happened and what happens next?
- Which banking services are the highest priority to restore?
- What protocols will you use if technological roadblocks prevent access to information systems?
- If the event affects personnel, what’s the minimum staffing required to maintain operations?
7. Recovery Protocols
The immediate response to a disruption doesn’t always translate into a full recovery, particularly when extensive damage occurs. As a result, it’s critical to outline additional protocols that will restore operations to 100 percent, which could take several hours, days or even weeks. Defining these procedures in your plan makes you better prepared for every possible disruption. It can also significantly shorten recovery time.
Questions to address:
- What steps will your team follow to fully restore operations?
- Which aspects of the business take priority if several operations are disrupted?
- Who will oversee the recovery for each type of disaster and who will they report to?
- What are your recovery objectives and expectations, and how long do you expect each type of recovery to take?
8. Data Backup & Recovery Technologies
More than most industries, financial institutions need to be especially aggressive in deploying technologies that thwart cyberattacks and accelerate recovery. In 2023, financial services was the second-most targeted industry in cyber security incidents that led to data compromise. Financial services organizations in the United States experienced 744 data compromises, more than the three previous years combined.
For this reason, data backup is a critical component that you need to define in your business continuity plan. In this section, you’ll identify the implemented technologies for restoring lost data in a variety of scenarios, along with clear recovery objectives. In addition to a bank’s data backup systems, this section can also include any other recovery technologies, such as redundant hardware and network repair tools.
Make sure to answer each of these questions in detail:
- What is the bank’s primary business continuity and disaster recovery system (BCDR)?
- Which data recovery methods will you use in various scenarios, such as ransomware, accidental deletion or hardware failure?
- What is the bank’s recovery point objective (RPO), and what is the maximum age of the most recent backup?
- What is the recovery time objective (RTO), and how long should it take to recover lost data or systems?
9. Contingencies
In addition to data backup, banks must have—at the very least—a “Plan B” for all other aspects of their operations. This section of the continuity plan should identify the bank’s contingency plans and redundancies for various disaster scenarios. You can place these contingencies in their own section or address them in each of the other sections.
Here are a few example scenarios to consider:
- What happens if a disaster destroys the physical bank location?
- What if attackers steal sensitive data in a cyberattack and demand a ransom?
- What if your operations are experiencing disruptions due to unavailable third-party service providers, such as utility, technology and ATM access providers?
- If you suddenly need additional hardware for a branch location, where will it come from, and—if you’ve already acquired it—where are you storing it?
10. Training & Education
Provide employees with routine training on disaster prevention, response and recovery. For example, educate staff on how to safely use email and the Internet, how to spot a phishing attack and what to do in a ransomware attack. This training applies not only to your disaster recovery teams but to all bank employees, including upper management.
In a bank business continuity plan, this section will outline these training programs and objectives in detail, focusing on these essential points:
- What types of training will help achieve the bank’s continuity objectives?
- How often does that training occur?
- Who receives the training?
- Who develops and manages it?
11. Methods & Hierarchy of Communications
Imagine that your telecommunications and other utilities go offline for weeks. How will managers and personnel communicate about the status of operations? Even for small disruptions, it’s critical that affected stakeholders know how to share information. When communication breaks down, recovery becomes far more challenging.
In this section of the plan, you’ll outline these communication strategies by answering questions like:
- Which methods will your organization use to maintain communications after a disaster?
- Which personnel will need emergency devices, such as mobile phones, and how will you assign and distribute them?
- If you need to provide the public with updates, what channels will you use to release information, what will you need to submit in a press release and who will communicate with the press?
12. Plan Updating, Testing and Reevaluation
Regularly reevaluating a bank business continuity plan is a coordinated effort that should involve several members of your organization. This is not a job for a single IT person or a lone executive assistant. It’s a comprehensive document with many eyes and minds involved in reviews and updates.
This section of your plan thus identifies who manages the planning and when it gets updated. It identifies:
- Who is in charge of maintaining your bank’s business continuity plan?
- How often does your bank need to review it?
- Who has access to the document and/or business continuity management software?
- How will you test the plan and determine whether its protocols are effective?
The Role of Business Continuity Plans in Banking & Financial
In financial services, a business continuity plan serves several important purposes:
- Identifying the risk and impact of operational disruptions
- Outlining procedures that mitigate the impact of disruptions
- Prioritizing recovery efforts and resources following a disaster
- Implementing technologies that support the bank’s recovery objectives
- Complying with regulatory requirements for business continuity
- Ensuring operational resilience
By thoroughly documenting these protocols and systems, a bank can fortify its ability to withstand disruptions and sustain its critical operations. In turn, this helps the financial institution minimize financial losses, downtime, regulatory fines and reputational damage.
Common Threats to Financial Institutions
On any given day, banks face numerous threats to their operations. Identifying and assessing the impact of these threats is one of the most critical components of business continuity planning for financial services organizations.
Here are just a few examples of disruptions that can affect a bank’s ability to maintain continuity:
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- Ransomware: A ransomware infection can rapidly disable a bank’s IT systems, destroy data and force it to close for days unless you can restore backups quickly.
- Malware and phishing scams: Like most businesses, banks face a barrage of malicious messages that sometimes get past firewalls and spam filtering technologies.
- System failure: Technology outages and interruptions are extremely common in the financial services industry, with causes ranging from hard drive failures to application crashes.
- Accidental data loss: While a single lost or deleted spreadsheet may not derail a bank’s operations, large-scale data loss from a failed migration or unsuccessful O/S installation can absolutely disrupt the business and cause productivity losses.
- Service provider disruptions: Banks often leverage third-party solutions, particularly for online banking systems and web applications, and they can experience service disruptions and damaged credibility when these systems go down.
- Emerging threats: Climate-related disasters and evolving technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) may have significant effects on the banking industry in the future, making it essential for financial institutions to invest heavily in business continuity planning.
These risks underscore the importance of banks having a robust business continuity plan that guides their decision-making at all stages of a disruption, no matter how sudden the event.
Examples of recent bank disruptions & attacks
Disruptions to bank operations—particularly stemming from IT vulnerabilities—have become very common in recent years:
- In 2025, customers of Bank America learned that their bank data may have been exposed during a ransomware attack on a third-party provider. Even though the attack happened months earlier, the disruption caused lasting legal and financial problems for Bank of America.
- In 2023, banks throughout the United States experienced deposit delaysbecause of an error at a payment processing network.
Plan Writing & Implementation
Developing a business continuity plan requires coordination across an organization across all departments and levels of the financial institution. Proper planning requires input not only from risk management, operations, human resources, IT, security teams and senior leadership.
For continuity planning to be effective, each department must identify potential vulnerabilities and mitigation strategies. This collaborative effort ensures that the BCP addresses the full range of potential disruptions as they relate to all facets and functions of the organization. Banks are also encouraged to leverage professional business continuity services to ensure their BCPs are aligned with industry best practices and regulatory requirements.
Identifying the Best Data Backup for Banks
Having data backup is vital to preventing operational disruptions from data loss, and choosing the right system is equally important. While there are many factors to consider when evaluating BCDR solutions, there are some core features and functions that most financial institutions should look for, namely:
- Backup frequency, speed, reliability and efficiency
- Hybrid storage methods that include both on-premises and cloud-based storage
- Ease and simplicity of the restoration process
- Backup virtualization for faster restores
- Ransomware detection to flag and prevent attacks
- Automation to achieve greater consistency and reduce your manual workload
In our experience, the best backup systems for banks are all-in-one solutions that have fully unified hardware, software and cloud backups. Systems like Datto SIRIS eliminate reliance on third-party cloud providers and enable a single, integrated stack for comprehensive data protection and recovery. (For more information, request Datto SIRIS pricing for your financial institution.)
Learn More about Business Continuity Planning for Banks
Given the critical need for continuity planning within the financial services industry, many federal agencies and ancillary organizations offer additional planning resources for banks. Some financial institutions are required to maintain continuity plans, such as investment firms and brokerages, which must comply with the rules of FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority). While these regulations do not apply to all types of banks, the agency provides detailed recommendations that any financial institution can use.
Some helpful resources include:
- FFIEC (Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council)
- FINRA Business Continuity Planning Guidance
- Federal Reserve Business Continuity Guide
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
1. What is a business continuity plan in a bank?
A business continuity plan is a framework designed to prevent disruptions to a bank’s operations. The plan outlines the recovery systems and procedures for a variety of disruptive scenarios, helping ensure the bank can stay open and continue serving customers during a disaster.
2. What does BCP mean in banking?
In banking, BCP stands for “business continuity plan,” which is a documented set of procedures designed to ensure that a financial institution’s essential functions can continue during and after an operational disruption.
3. What is the first step in business continuity planning for banks?
Conducting a risk assessment is an important first step in business continuity planning for financial institutions. This assessment identifies the threats that are most likely to disrupt the bank’s operations, allowing you to implement systems and procedures that mitigate those risks and ensure a smooth recovery.
4. What are the 5 components of a business continuity plan?
While each plan is unique, every business continuity plan should include the following five components, at minimum:
- Plan objectives
- Risk assessment
- Business impact analysis
- Disaster recovery procedures
- Plan testing
These five components represent only a fragment of the sections you should include in your bank business continuity plan. However, they achieve the most critical objective: implementing protocols that help to maintain continuity during a disaster and mitigate the impact of known risks.
5. What is a BCM in banking?
BCM stands for business continuity management, a process of managing a bank’s preparedness for operational disruptions. BCM can involve managing a financial institution’s business continuity plan, including the systems and procedures for mitigating the impact of an operational disruption.
6. What does disaster recovery mean in banking?
Disaster recovery refers to the strategies a business uses to recover from an operational disruption. In banking, these strategies can include IT systems, such as data backup, or step-by-step procedures to restore a bank’s critical operations when a disruption occurs.
7. Is business continuity a regulatory requirement for banks?
Some financial institutions are required to maintain business continuity plans in compliance with federal regulations. This is particularly true for investment firms, which must adhere to FINRA’s Emergency Preparedness Rule 4370, requiring specific procedures for developing and maintaining a business continuity plan.
Conclusion
Developing a comprehensive bank business continuity plan is essential for every financial institution. By prioritizing disaster prevention, risk management and recovery planning, banks can effectively safeguard their operations and maintain trust in the face of any disruption. Our checklist above is just a starting point. Financial institutions should invest in a robust BCP, customized to their unique risk profile, operational needs and regulatory environment.
Protect your bank’s data – and your operational resilience
Invenio IT can help you learn about BCDR solutions that safeguard your financial institution from data loss and other disasters. Schedule a call with one of our data protection specialists to get the insights and advice you need to protect your financial institution. You can also reach us by calling (646) 395-1170 or emailing success@invenioIT.com.
