BUSINESS RESUMPTION FACILITIES HELP RESTORE CUSTOMER SERVICES

AVON, CT - September 9, 2003 - Try this unlucky banking scenario: It's payday. Your bank's customers are in the supermarket buying groceries with their debit cards when word arrives - the main office has burned to the ground. While your staff collects in the parking lot, customers are flooding the switchboard with questions, checks are being presented against insufficient balances, and loan bills are still arriving in the mail.

While most business resumption efforts focus on systems, equally critical recovery components are customer service and back office operations. Being able to answer the phone, process loan payments, and return items for insufficient funds may directly affect the bank's survival following a disaster.

To help banks through the full range of business resumption tasks, data processing service bureaus such as COCC now offer "seats" at their disaster recovery centers for financial institutions to resume their operations following a disaster.

"COCC has offered full disaster recovery services for years," said F. Scott Johnson, COCC's Vice President - Research and Systems Development. "We have added a business resumption component to assist the financial institution in resuming business if its back office is unusable."

The advantage of co-locating these facilities in the disaster recovery center is enormous, since data communications are already in place and equipment is available to process banking transactions. At COCC's business resumption center, Johnson said that banks can easily retrieve exception information, such as unposted items, and make pay/no pay decisions, balance ACH and foreign ATM activity, and respond to customer queries as if the bank were fully operational. Technicians are available to activate and maintain communications with the appropriate systems.

"These basic banking activities maintain the bank's stability as well as preserve the public's faith in the institution," said Johnson. "Being able to honor checks, receive loan payments, and resolve debit card and home banking disputes is key to retaining the customer, so that when the bank is fully restored and operational, its customers will remain."

"With COCC's facilities for account, ATM, and debit card processing, the technology side of business resumption is in place," Johnson added. "The final customer service and back office components complete the business resumption picture to ensure the long term survival of the bank."

COCC now offers the customer service and back room recovery features of its business resumption services to any financial institution. Recovery of check, core and ATM processing is restricted to current COCC clients.

"Disasters take many forms," Johnson added. "If a disaster hits a bank such that they cannot conduct business from their primary location, then they will need to relocate certain critical departments. This is a highly effective strategy for restoring bank functionality in a disaster situation."