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 in 2024. The NOAA is forecasting four to seven major hurricanes.

So how do you protect your organization against the disruption of a hurricane this year? Central to your plan is knowing how you will regain power and internet access - critical for both obtaining account information and initiating transactions - if power is lost. That can mean designating a recovery site equipped with internet access, as well as ensuring key treasury employees can re-establish internet access, wherever they are, using a "hot spot" device.

Plan ahead and document procedures

A well-documented business continuity plan can help your organization anticipate evacuation procedures, response team, and react timely so you can resume normal business operations. One of the first steps in developing such a plan is to conduct a detailed review of operations and document all cash flow-related processes and how a disaster would impact them.

Treasury Manager can help your business run smoothly in a disaster environment because you will have electronic access to your accounts, payables and receivables. You have complete access to all your accounts and services from either your 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 which gives you the ability to utilize all the system features from anywhere— whether you’re using a mobile phone or tablet.
  
  
• Plan for remote office necessities. Make sure to bring all hardware (laptop and tokens) and software you will need to continue to do business remotely in case of evacuation.
  
  
• Make timely payments. With Treasury Manager, you can use your smartphone or other mobile device to review information, initiate and approve transactions, make payments and manage accounts anywhere you have internet access. In a disaster, you also will benefit from electronic payment origination capabilities, which aren’t subject to Postal Service delays as checks are. For example, ACH lets you directly deposit pay into employee accounts and avoid the delays that can come with distributing payroll checks.
  
  
• Collect payments. Remote and mobile deposit can enable staff to deposit checks into a bank account online, when physically transporting them to a bank branch would be challenging.
  
  
• Meet temporary financing needs. Talk to your banker about establishing a line of credit sufficient to keep your business afloat if cash flow from customer payments were to dwindle temporarily.
  
  
• Keep cash on hand. If you are a retail business with a lot of cash receipts, and you must be able to make change, plan to order extra coin and currency from your bank in advance of forecasted bad-weather events.
  
  
• Make emergency purchases. Commercial cards can enable essential personnel to cover emergency business expenses.

Test to evaluate preparedness

It’s not enough to draw up a good plan and adopt banking products that are useful in disaster situations. You also need to train appropriate staff members on every facet of your plan, so they know what to do and how to use the tools at their disposal.

Don’t wait until a disaster strikes to learn if your business continuity plan works. Test your plan regularly using a combination of informal, discussion-based meetings — sometimes called “table-top” sessions — and actual hands-on, full-scale recovery exercises.

As part of your business continuity planning, talk to a Hancock Whitney banker or Treasury Services Specialist at 1-866-594-2304 to learn more about how Treasury Manager can help.