Financial Banking & Insurance Services

In order to protect lives, reputation and assets, the ability to quickly and accurately reach key stakeholders, customers and employees during a crisis or incident is critical for financial service organisations such as banks and insurance companies.

During a crisis people responsible for business continuity planning and disaster recovery such as corporate relations teams, crisis management teams, emergency command centres or risk management groups need to swiftly reach key people with the guarantee and peace of mind that the messages get through to the intended recipients.

OCA can assist with the following:

Critical infrastructure from a strategic point of view
Major hazards affecting financial assets
Minor incident response where automation of procedures can be planned and enacted (eg Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery)
OHS&E incidents in the financial environment
Resource deployment in an incident management context
Crisis Communication

OCA Incident Manager supports:

Use	Description
Financial sector assets & critical infrastructure	Financial services organisations may have many and varied critical assets. Banking branches. Managed Property. ATMs. Executive Stakeholders. OCA allows you to map out your critical infrastructure at any level of detail, track dependencies and stakeholder information, and manage site appointments and response plans. With rich media integration such as CCTV feeds, images, video or alert triggers, it provides all the information you need in a central place - giving you a total operational picture to monitor your infrastructure and respond to risks. With the asset import and synchronisation tools, you don't have to replace your asset management system. Rather it can complement that information and allow you to utilise this information from a strategic point of view. OCA's asset management functionality can be configured to show how many resources are available at any time, so you can allocate resources to deal with incidents more rapidly.
Major hazards	Financial institutions can be impacted by natural hazards, whether such incidents have an environmental or human impact. Public financial facilities can be damaged by floods, cyclones and fires. You may need to enact business continuity plans to communicate to staff and customers, get contingency plans in place and keep your banking operations going. Customers may be affected financially and that places a whole range of other pressures on you: more financial assistance, customer services and total work effort. OCA can assist in planning and response for such incidents within your own financial emergency response team, and it can also assist co-ordination of shared resources with governance agencies via the OCA Connect interoperability tool.
Get a total picture of your business as usual incidents	If you're like most financial institutions, you'll have a variety of business units using different software to manage different processes. You'll have one to register OHS&E incidents, one to manage your business continuity and disaster recovery plans, risk management and major emergencies. Many financial organisations have resources distributed rather than having one centralised asset. Hardware and software devices to manage such financial assets' information can also vary widely. The OCA can assist by bringing information about disparate asset and information sources into the one system, giving you a common operating picture of what is going on, where.
Security incidents	Financial Institutions spend more money on security than other sector, and security incidents happen every day. Not all of them are the ATM ram raiders that attract so much attention in the media. There are many minor security breaches and security issues with customers and staff alike. Often manual monitoring and escalation is required, with the potential for delays in responses, inconsistencies and wasted effort. OCA can consume alarms and other data from a wide variety of third party systems, and escalate automatically when key conditions are met. Not only can OCA notify key stakeholders immediately, but it can task people and automate standard operating procedures, ensuring that the correct protocols are followed and minimising delays. OCA does more than just create an alarm, its workflow tool can create an action plan to deal with that incident trigger.
IT incidents	IT incidents happen on a regular basis in all organisations, but IT incidents in the financial sector can have a greater impact than any other sector. IT outages that happen at critical times such as currency changes, or banking clearance times have the ability to cause tangible financial loss. IT outages such as the unavailability of internet banking services can affect hundreds of thousands of businesses, and consumers, and can cost financial institutions business and damage reputations. OCA does not replace IT monitoring systems, but allows you to input IT alerts from multiple systems into the one system, so you have a total overview of any IT outages from the business at a strategic level. OCA also allows you to automate the human responses in relation to IT events.
Compliance & business continuity	Financial organisations are heavily governed by compliance requirements. Decision making in relation to incidents, preparation and response forms part of those compliance requirements and is keenly monitored. An incident happens and you need to work out whether you had done everything you could to ensure that that asset was adequately monitored and maintained? Did you do the inspections properly? Did you have audit and monitoring tools in place? If you look after assets that are have a steady flow of the public, then you may have to deal with OHS&E matters in a very specific manner. OCA can assist by ensuring that you follow the right procedures in relation to compliance and business continuity. The tasking system allows you to automate regular tasks such as inspections, updating business continuity plans or common responses to OHS&E issues, and the workflow engine allows you to ensure that tasks are completed or escalated. OCA's full audit trail can also track where decisions have been made, whether you responded in the timelines that you set for yourself, and provide transparency in post hoc investigations into incidents, whether they are an internal audit or an independent commission.
Make decisions quickly & mitigate your costs	When your financial infrastructure is impacted by incidents the cost can be enormous. Not finding the root cause of the problem early on can have an on-flow effect to other operational capabilities. Every second counts in response to incidents. OCA can shorten your response times and reduce the financial and brand reputational impact. OCA has a powerful workflow engine that allows you to automate response procedures - business continuity plans, emergency response plans or standard operating procedures - to ensure that your resources follow the plan.
Alerting	The OCA alerting platform is totally integrated in OCA. You can send and receive information via the OCA communication gateway via email, SMS, fax, voice and XML. Send out reminders for site inspections of critical financial infrastructure, keep key stakeholders informed, and use the workflow tools to automate communications and tasking. You can also send messages from a single source to multiple media, including public websites, intranets, and social media tools. The alerting tools in OCA are totally integrated with your incident and asset management, tasking, and situational awareness, meaning that you can send out the right information at the touch of a button. Moreover, if you have standardised communication that needs to be sent in response to particular incidents, then the OCA workflows tool can automate that communication. Often an incident will affect a geographical area, or multiple areas. The OCA geospatial tools allow you to plot affected areas and send communications to key stakeholders in those areas. Using the asset tool you can reach key utilities workers and responders in a targeted and sophisticated manner. You can also use OCA to quickly identify assets and people within a geographical area, or mark-up an incident map for sharing with other stakeholders.
Protecting your reputation, getting the message out	Even minor incidents in the financial sector can have a huge impact on customers, their ability to get money and then do what they need to do with that money , and this has a flow effect on how your organisation is perceived. Unfortunate as it is, customers and media love to bash banking sector. Even banking competitors do a good job at bashing other banks. Getting the message through to your stakeholders expeditiously may not resolve the problem, but it can help manage expectations, and that in turn assists in preserving your brand's reputation. Getting the message out via other information distributors - radio, television, newspapers or social media can make a big difference. With OCA you can also send messages from a single source to multiple media, including public websites, intranets, and social media tools.
Security	Security of information is key for financial companies, from a privacy compliance point of view, but also from the potential to disrupt operations and fraud. Take the recent Sony Playstation credit card breach situation. OCA Incident Manager guarantees security and is the only incident management product in the world to be certified to the internationally recognised Common Criteria EAL2+ security rating - (ISO/IEC 15408). The OCA's multi-node cloud software offering is hosted by Fujitsu, whose data centres met the stringent ASIO T4 and ISO27001 standards. You can also host the application yourself, and we have experience in setting up hardware in high-security environments. If security of data matters to you, then you can't do better than OCA.
Resource planning, tracking	The OCA asset and request modules can be used to allocate any resources to incidents be they human, fixed, mobile, vehicles or equipment. Not only can you assign resources to your own staff within the system, but you can also send external requests for assistance to third party agencies using the OCA communications gateway. Resources can be tracked and allocated by many ways- geographical, by resource availability, by capability, by type, by cost. You can also enter costs against resource requests or allocations, to easily track the overall cost of a response or recovery effort. The OCA Designer tool allows you to create new asset categories on the fly.
Crisis severity	OCA deals with different levels of crises, and can be easily configured to match your crisis matrix. When an incident moves from low to high severity, you can use the workflow tool to send communication out to staff and get them in to work on the incident, quickly and efficiently.