Business Continuity and the Banking Industry

Since the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center (Lam, 2002), tsunami disaster and hurricane Katrina, there has been renewed interest in emergency planning in both the private and public sectors. In particular, as managers realize the size of potential exposure to unmanaged risk (Quirchmayr, 2004), insuring “business continuity” (BC) is becoming a key task within all industrial and financial sectors. Although the risk of terrorism and regulations are identified as two key factors for developing a business continuity perspective, we see that organizations need to adopt the BC approach for strategic reasons. The trend to adopt a BC approach is also a proxy for organizational change in terms of culture, structure and communications. The BC approach is increasingly viewed as a driver to generate competitive advantage in the form of resilient information systems and as an important marketing characteristic to attract and maintain customers.