By Sam | August 14, 2013

What Does Downtime Really Cost My Credit Union?

Measuring the impact of a service disruption can be pretty subjective but it doesn’t need to be.  As a BCP planner, we often talk about the severity of a crisis based on things such as member confidence, exposure to fraud or reputational risk. But let’s be honest, the measurement we’re all seeking to quantify but just can’t seem to wrap our arms around is  monetary! What does downtime really cost?

It is imperative to understand your financial impact since mitigating risks takes money so the challenge has been to “justify” and prioritize resources (time, money, people) to guard against a situation that may/may not occur. To even begin this process you need to know a few things gathered during your business impact analysis – a list of your  critical processes are and what your RTO values are for those processes.

With this data in hand you can begin the process of assessing your financial risk. Fortunately, we’ve developed an app for that (just kidding – I’ve always wanted to say that.) But seriously, we HAVE developed a tool that will assess this for you and we’re introducing it to our blog subscribers this week! Our Financial Impact Analysis Tool (FIA) will calculate:

• ACH Risk
• Delinquency Risk
• Daily Transaction Risk
• Fee Income Risk
• Check & ACH Risk
• Daily Loan Risk
• Reputational Risk (I know, I know.. you’re thinking what?! How do you assign a dollar value to reputational risk?) Trust me, it’s not easy but we feel we’ve come up with a pretty good model.

To measure potential impact, you must look at the measurable results of a normal business day in your Credit Union and your 5300 report provides a snapshot for performance based on industry recognized measurements – fee income, interest income, etc.

To learn more about how you can measure the financial impact of a service disruption, contact the BCP team today and we’ll run you a FREE Financial Impact Analysis (FIA)!