The Client Profile
Based on assets, Union Bank is among the 25 largest banks in the United States. The bank has 320 branch offices in California, Washington, and Oregon, 2 international offices, and facilities in six other states.

The Business Problem
Union Bank of California’s (UBOC) Contingency Planning & Disaster Recovery department needed to implement a formal Business Impact Analysis (BIA) process. UBOC wanted to gather and validate data about the impact of downtime on individual departments and assign criticality and priorities for business resumption. Contingency Planning & Disaster Recovery provided a list of 124 departments that had the potential to critically impact UBOC.

TechProse was hired to investigate the existing data, gather new data as necessary, and devise a set of criteria to measure the financial and reputational impact of various periods of down time on the bank for each department. The final deliverable was a detailed report with clear metrics and priorities.

The TechProse Solution
A team of TechProse consultants completed a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to measure and quantify the impact of business interruption. The key to conducting the BIA was to plan the approach so that the information gathered would be useful to prioritizing business processes, identifying interdependencies, and conceiving recovery strategies. TechProse collected data for the BIA via interviews and a detailed questionnaire.

TechProse consultants clarified the source and interpretation of the reported numbers, and verified the upstream and downstream dependencies for each department. Once validated, consultants entered data into a customized database. The team completed the project on-time and within budget, and delivered.

The following email came to TechProse from the project manager several months after the deliverables: “The consultants went through a thorough validation process, and entered data into a customized database. We just went through am OCC audit of our BIA process and system. It is the first time I have ever gone through an audit and the auditors had no issues. In fact, they said that they were very impressed. Based on their conclusions, our internal audit department has decided that they no longer need to do an audit of the BIA.”