Ensuring Resilience: Business Continuity Planning for Treasury Clients

It's that time, revisit your essential business continuity steps for this hurricane season.

The experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predict 'above-normal' hurricane activity for 2025, underscoring the need for robust business continuity planning.

To safeguard your organization against disruption, prioritize restoring power and internet access—essential for account information and transactions—after a hurricane. This could involve setting up a recovery site equipped with internet capabilities and ensuring that key treasury employees can reconnect from anywhere, using mobile or hotspot devices.

Plan ahead and document procedures

A well-documented business continuity plan enables your organization to anticipate evacuation procedures, establish a response team, and resume business operations in a timely manner. A key first step is conducting a detailed review of operations, documenting all cash flow-related processes, and assessing their vulnerability to disasters.

Treasury Manager helps ensure smooth business operations during disasters, giving you electronic access to accounts, payables, and receivables, available anytime via laptop or mobile device.

Partner with your bank

Your bank can help bolster your continuity capabilities through various treasury management solutions. 

• Download the convenient Treasury Manager app to utilize all the system features from anywhere—whether on a mobile phone or tablet—while accessing application services, managing decision exceptions in Positive Pay, making deposits with mobile deposit, and paying bills through Bill Pay Manager.

• Plan for remote office essentials. Bring all hardware (laptop and tokens) and software necessary to maintain business operations in the event of an evacuation.

• Make timely payments. With Treasury Manager, you can use your smartphone or tablet to review information, initiate and approve transactions, and manage accounts from anywhere with internet access. In a disaster, benefit from electronic payment origination, such as ACH for direct employee deposits, to avoid Postal Service delays and payroll check distribution issues.

• Collect payments. Remote and mobile deposit allow staff to deposit checks into a bank account online, especially when physical trips to a bank branch would be challenging.
  
  
• Meet temporary financing needs. Discuss with your banker about establishing a line of credit sufficient to keep your business afloat if cash flow from customer payments were to temporarily.

• Keep cash on hand. If you run a retail business with high cash receipts and need to make change, plan to order extra coin and currency from your bank ahead of forecasted bad-weather events.

• Make emergency purchases. Commercial cards can enable essential personnel to cover emergency business expenses.

Test to evaluate preparedness

Creating a solid plan and adopting disaster-ready banking products like Treasury Manager is a start, but training staff on all aspects of the plan ensures they know how to act and use the tools available.

Don’t wait for a disaster to test your business continuity plan. Regularly evaluate it through informal discussion-based sessions (like table-top exercises) and full-scale recovery drills.

Enhance your business continuity planning by speaking to a Hancock Whitney banker or Treasury Services Specialist at 1-866-594-2304 to discover how Treasury Manager can assist.