BANK OPERATIONS UPDATE: Supporting Internal Customers

Supporting multiple locations, whether branches or discrete banks, brings a variety of challenges. From an operations and technology perspective, however, the key is to provide a consistent customer
experience across all locations. This means the ability of the teller, loan, and deposit platform systems to serve customers from any location. It further means that line speeds and server horsepower, two key components of the speed with which applications load and run on your employee's computers, must be up to par across all locations. In addition to purchasing systems and data communications capacity that are properly sized, the walking around test is necessary. That is, get out into the remote locations and watch your employees as they use their systems . . are screens slow to load and change, making it hard for employees to serve customers in a timely fashion? If so, it's time to begin addressing why, by looking at communications lines, network capabilities, and other components of adequate access times.

Contingency Planning

Contingency planning is a rare item these days: a regulatory requirement that is also a prudent business practice. You have to be sure, through analysis and testing, that you have plans and methods in place for business continuation. All contingency planning has a three pronged focus:

1. Prevention – taking steps to greatly reduce the possibility of an occurrence. This is easier for things you control (installing redundant power supplies and hard drives in your network servers) than things you don't control (weather).
   
   
2. Minimization – planning and testing will contribute to a lessening of the impact of any occurrence
   
   
3. Restoration – again, the planning and testing you've done will enhance your ability to respond and begin to restore operations.

In the context of technology planning, be sure that contingency and DR are integrated into all of your efforts.