Latest survey findings
By EMMIE V. ABADILLA
In the event of a disaster, most Filipinos cannot draw their money from their banks, securities and insurers right away.
Only 33 percent of 16 Philippine financial services institutions (FSIs) surveyed can restore their operations in three to six hours. Another 22 percent will not be able to do so within 24 hours, according to Financial Insights, a leading consulting and research company and subsidiary of IDC.
In terms of disaster recovery and business continuity, local FSIs are behind their international counterparts. The benchmarks for international best practices to recover and resume activities is at least 4 hours following a disaster, according to Ian Loh, EMC South Asia director for Financial Services.
EMC, the world leader in information management and storage, sponsored the recent Financial Insights study which covered 5 banks, 7 insurance and 3 security companies in the country.
The banks included Metropolitan Bank and Trust Co., Allied Bank, Equitable PCI Bank Inc., Union Bank of the Philippines and Development Bank of the Philippines.
The insurers which participated are Ayala Life Assurance, Berkley International Life, Cocolife, GrepaLife, Malayan Insurance Co., Philam Life, Pramerica Life, while the securities firms include ATR-Kim Eng. Securities Inc., DBP-Daiwa Securities, SMBC Philippines Inc. and Philippines Equity Partners.
Of the local FSIs surveyed, the insurers came out as the laggards with 43 percent over the 24-hour mark, against 60 percent of banks with downtime of below 12 hours, and two-thirds of the securities firms able to recover within 3-6 hours.
Financial Insights researchers put the subjects to trial 1-3 times on average, with system failures from hardware/software and Information Technology (IT) systems malfunction occurring at that level of regularity within the last 12 months.
"Abroad, banks lose anywhere from US million to $ 250 million for every minute they fail to restore their operations," according to Cyrus Daruwala, Financial Insights managing director for research and consulting. "In the Philippines, suffer $ 10,000 to $ 80,000 loss per minute."
While local FSIs operate in a compliant and accommodating environment when it concerns government regulations pertaining to Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR), application and infrastructure architecture was the single most important factor driving security spending.
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