The Joint Forum today released for consultation a paper entitled
High-level principles for business continuity which was developed in
response to a request from the Financial Stability Forum. The objective of this
initiative is to support international standard setting organisations and
national authorities in their efforts to improve the resilience of financial
systems to major operational disruptions.
The paper promotes a common base level of resilience across national boundaries
by establishing a consistent context for the development of business continuity
arrangements. It provides authorities with a broad framework for developing
business continuity arrangements that are more closely tailored to their unique
sectoral and local circumstances. The high-level principles in this paper are
directed at both financial industry participants and financial authorities
globally.
The Chairman of the Joint Forum, Ian Johnston, said today, “Many
organisations active in the financial services industry already have in place
effective approaches to business continuity management. I believe this paper
takes business continuity a step further, making a valuable contribution to
systemic resilience by establishing a common global framework for approaching
key business continuity issues and highlighting concepts that are relatively
new in this area. One aspect of the paper that I think organisations will find
particularly helpful is the manner in which the principles are driven home by
linking them explicitly to the lessons learned from actual operational
disruptions.”
He continued, “I am pleased to release these high-level cross-sectoral
principles and would encourage financial industry participants and financial
authorities alike to provide comments during the consultation period.”
Ian Johnston is a member of the senior management of the Hong Kong Securities
and Futures Commission.
The Joint Forum was established in 1996 under the aegis of the BCBS, IOSCO, and
the IAIS to deal with issues common to the banking, securities and insurance
sectors, including the supervision of financial conglomerates.
The paper is available on the websites of the Bank for International Settlements
( http://www.bis.org),
IOSCO ( http://www.iosco.org)
and the IAIS ( http://www.iaisweb.org).
Comments are invited and should be forwarded by e-mail to the Joint Forum
Secretariat at baselcommittee@bis.org
by 10 March 2006.