Last October and November the three main financial authorities in the UK, the Bank of England, the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority, carried out a Market Wide Exercise to test the financial sector’s resilience to pandemic influenza. The executive summary of this exercise has now been publicly issued.
A flu pandemic is currently considered by government to be one of the leading risks to the UK. This Market Wide Exercise was the largest of its kind in the world and a thorough test of the financial sector’s ability to stand up against such a pandemic. The exercise simulated the first 22 weeks of an influenza pandemic and ran for six weeks, in October and November. Seventy organisations took part involving around 3500 people. The objectives were to provide each participant with an opportunity to review, test and update their plans, and to assess whether there were any sector-wide issues to be addressed.
The main impact was upon the availability of personnel rather than on physical assets. Firms were forced to examine a whole range of polices including repatriation of staff from overseas locations, quarantine rules, certifying sickness, use of vaccines, forced or voluntary absence, morale, bereavement counselling, dealing with financial hardship and flexible operating of staff across business units. Home working strategies were also tested and issues involved effective compliance and control over remote activity, IT security considerations, maintaining IT support capabilities and health and safety issues. The exercise also questioned whether the telecoms infrastructure could support large-scale home working for a prolonged period when staff shortages in the telecoms sector progressively eroded maintenance capability.
Market wide issues that emerged included reliance on home-working, making cash distribution more resilient, availability of branch networks and ATMs, the need to keep the financial markets open, addressing credit and liquidity issues in the wholesale markets, the impacts of disruption or closure of exchanges or infrastructure providers, and whether there was a need to relax any of the financial regulations.
The three authorities now plan to take these and other issues forward with the industry through a series of follow up workshops and seminars.
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