12-Point Bank Business Continuity Plan Checklist [Updated for 2025]

This post was originally published at https://invenioit.com/continuity/bank-business-continuity-plan/

Disasters are never good, but they’re especially dangerous in the finance industry. Disruptions to a single bank’s operations have the power to tarnish the brand and disrupt entire markets, and data loss can compromise the financial information of thousands of customers. To avert these scenarios, a bank business continuity plan must account for every disaster possible, along with the proper protocols for recovery.

Your business continuity plan needs to answer a lot of questions long before a disaster strikes. For starters, you need to know what your priorities are after a disaster, who will be in charge, and how you’ll restore your operations. Plus, you need to decide where your personnel will go for answers and what you’ll do if you can’t get in touch with key stakeholders.

Trying to answer all these questions at once can feel overwhelming. Using a checklist helps you focus on each issue individually, ensuring you address all the points you need to cover in your business continuity plan.

Common Threats to Financial Institutions

The average consumer might assume that the greatest threat to a bank is a robbery or a devastating natural disaster because those events make big headlines. In reality, banks face numerous other threats almost daily, and they’re often even more destructive.

Here are just a few threats that can affect a bank’s operational continuity:

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 busines 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 change and evolving technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) may have significant effects on the banking industry in the future, making it essential that you solidify your business continuity planning today.

Sometimes banks believe that they’ve put such strong protections in place that they’re essentially immune to these kinds of disasters. Unfortunately, threats are always present and often out of your control.

For example, in 2023, banks throughout the United States experienced deposit delays because of minor error at a payment processing network. While this is a seemingly small-scale disaster, it can nevertheless upset customers and damage your reputation. That’s why it’s so critical to have a solid business continuity plan that guides your decision-making in the moment, no matter how sudden or unexpected the event.

Essential Components of a Bank Business Continuity Plan

While there is no one-size-fits-all business continuity plan template for banks, we’ve put together a checklist of areas that every plan should address. Each section of the checklist includes an overview of what it should include as well as a list of questions that you should aim to answer.

__ Managerial Protocols

This is the foundation of a bank business continuity plan because it outlines what needs to happen before, during, and after a disruption. This framework will apply to virtually all scenarios, regardless of the type of disaster or how many bank branches are affected.

Your protocols should explain:

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?
Who needs to do what to restore operations?

__ Plan Objectives

Defining the scope of your plan is crucial because every organization has unique needs and goals. Include this information at the beginning of the plan 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?

__ Risk Assessment

Financial services business have to understand what disasters might look like to adequately plan for them. Perform comprehensive risk assessments that identify every possible threat to their operations, including everything from cyberattacks to electrical outages. Provide detailed descriptions of what these risks entail and what causes them.

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?

__ Business Impact Analysis

After identifying risks, the next step is analyzing how they’ll impact your organization. This uncovers the most urgent threats so you can prioritize your planning. Define each operational disruption listed in the risk assessment by its effects on the bank, including the estimated length of an outage, impact on customer-facing services, and financial impact.

Use these points 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?

__ Prevention Strategies

Your bank business continuity plan can’t prevent every disaster, but it can greatly minimize the risks and prevent the worst possible outcomes. Your plan should identify the steps you are already actively taking to prevent operational disruptions in a disaster. List disaster-specific scenarios and strategies that you use to monitor and prevent them.

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?

__ 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 stop. This is sometimes 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 if limitations are in place?
What protocols will you use if technological roadblocks prevent access to information systems?
If the event affects staffing, what’s the minimum staffing required to maintain operations?

__ 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 days or even weeks. Defining these procedures in your plan makes you better prepared for every possible disruption and can significantly shorten recovery time.

These are the most important questions to consider as you create your recovery protocols:

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?

__ 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 you 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?

__ 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 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?

__ 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?

__ 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?

__ Business Continuity Plan Writing, Testing, and Reevaluation

Writing and 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 Importance of a Custom Continuity Plan

Because writing a business continuity plan is such a time-consuming and often tedious process, you might consider simply copying and pasting a generic business continuity plan sample for banks. The problem is that no two banks are exactly the same, and what works in one plan might be irrelevant in yours.

Rather than taking someone else’s plan and labeling it your own, use this checklist to identify the core objectives of your plan. In addition, speak to a business continuity professional to build out the details based on your bank’s specific needs.

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, finding an all-in-one solution that meets these criteria and has fully unified hardware, software, and cloud backups can mean the difference between massive and minimal damage when a disaster occurs. In the age of ransomware, even small banks need high-quality backup systems.

Learn More About Business Continuity Planning for Banks

Business continuity plans ensure that banks can recover quickly from an operational disruption, averting prolonged downtime and maintaining operational continuity. An effective plan will include a thorough risk assessment and impact analysis, followed by the systems and procedures for recovering from a disaster.

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) https://ithandbook.ffiec.gov/it-booklets/business-continuity-management
FINRA Business Continuity Planning Guidance
Federal Reserve Business Continuity Guide

Invenio IT can also help you learn about BCDR solutions that safeguard your bank 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.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. What is a bank business continuity plan?

A business continuity plan or BCP 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 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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, which requires specific procedures for developing and maintaining a business continuity plan.