FSTC formulating financial services business continuity benchmarks

The New York-based Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC) says fifteen financial institutions and technology companies are participating in a project to create benchmarks for business continuity planning. FSTC says its Resiliency Model Project addresses the critical need for financial institutions to plan and measure contingency activities against a set of industry standards. Dan Schutzer, executive director of FSTC, says: “Currently, there are no industry-wide benchmarks against which institutions can measure their resiliency performance and make investment decisions. The results of this effort will be invaluable to the industry going forward.”

The first phase of the project concluded in November 2005, and it identified and documented essential capabilities of operational resiliency, developed a road map and began building a common taxonomy. During the second phase, participating institutions will work together to document goals and practices and develop a draft framework. The second phase of the initiative will also flesh out benchmarking metrics and measurements, and explore ways in which the process improvement framework can be used to assess an organization’s operational resiliency capability.

The FSTC has partnered with the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) for the project. The SEI’s CERT Program is conducting applied research in the application of process improvement techniques to information security and operational resiliency. The Resiliency Model Project is a follow-on to the FSTC’s business continuity compliance initiative which was completed in June 2005 and documented more than 100 business continuity regulations, standards, and guidelines affecting U.S. financial institutions.

-read more at the FSTC Web site