Description

A focused course, tailored for you

The Regional Bank Business Continuity Lead's Recovery Playbook

Move from binder-era BIA worksheets to a regulator-ready continuity programme the FRB exam team and the Treasury Services head will both sign off on.

Your BIA still says wire-room RTO is four hours. The core was converted last cycle. The FRB BCM exam letter is in the queue. The Treasury Services head is asking for evidence the wire and ACH runbooks have actually been tested. None of those facts agree with each other yet.

$199 one-time

Tailored to your situation. Access within 24 hours. 30-day money-back.

Includes a hand-built implementation playbook delivered alongside course access, generated for your specific situation.

Why this course

The Business Continuity Lead role at a regional bank is the seat where regulator expectations, line-of-business reality, and the post-conversion process map are supposed to meet. In practice they sit in three different file shares and three different heads. The BIA was built against a process map that does not exist anymore. The runbooks were written for the prior core. The tabletops happened but the after-action lives in someone's inbox. Third-party concentration risk is a slide nobody updates because nobody owns the cloud and core vendor inventory. The FRB exam team arrives expecting one coherent programme and the bank produces six binders. The Treasury Services head, the Card Operations head, the CIO and the Operations Risk Committee each want a different cut of the same evidence. The Business Continuity Lead has to produce all of those cuts from the same source of truth, in the same quarter, while a conversion or a vendor migration is still settling.

What you walk away with

A BIA rebuilt against your actual current process map, with RTO and RPO numbers the line-of-business heads have signed against.
Recovery runbooks for wire, ACH, card, retail branch and mortgage servicing that the exam team accepts as tested evidence.
A tabletop cadence and after-action template that produces the documentary trail FRB BCM exams ask for.
A third-party resilience view that names your cloud, core, card-network and key fintech vendors and shows concentration exposure.
A resilience report the Operations Risk Committee and the holding-company board can read without your team rewriting it for each audience.

The 12 modules

Module 1. Map the current programme honestly

Walk the existing BIA, runbooks, third-party register and tabletop after-actions side by side with the current org chart and post-conversion process map. Catalogue what is current, what is stale, what is missing, and what the FRB BCM examination letter will ask for next. The output is a one-page programme heat map you can hand to the Operations Risk Committee before any rebuild starts.

Module 2. Rebuild the BIA against the actual process map

Replace the spreadsheet BIA inherited from the prior core with a process-anchored BIA mapped to wire, ACH, card-network, retail branch, mortgage servicing and treasury-management flows. Capture RTO, RPO, maximum tolerable downtime and impact tiering with explicit line-of-business sign-off so the numbers survive a regulator challenge.

Module 3. Wire and ACH recovery runbooks

Write the wire-room and ACH operations recovery runbooks against the actual cutover steps with named roles, decision points, Fedwire and FedACH dependencies, contingency processing positions and a tested handover to the correspondent. Includes the format the Federal Reserve resilience reviewers expect to see and a worked retest record.

Module 4. Card, retail branch and mortgage servicing runbooks

Build the second-tier runbooks where most regional banks lose evidence quality. Card-network outage runbook, retail branch lobby continuity, ATM and online-banking degradation procedures, mortgage servicing continuity for default-rate spikes and storm events, and the integration points to your call-centre overflow contracts.

Module 5. Crisis management framework that the C-suite will actually use

Replace the dusty incident-command memo with a crisis management framework keyed to your actual escalation chain, with named on-call positions, decision rights, regulator-notification triggers, customer-communication channels and an executive battle rhythm. Includes the templates the Chief Operations Officer and the General Counsel need on day zero.

Module 6. Tabletop cadence the exam team accepts as evidence

Design the tabletop programme that ties to your highest-impact processes, runs four times a year with a different scenario each cycle, and produces the dated after-action records FRB BCM exams expect. Includes scenario templates for core outage, cyber ransomware, ACH origination misroute, severe-weather branch closure and a third-party cloud region failure.

Module 7. Third-party resilience and concentration risk

Inventory the vendors that actually carry your continuity exposure: the core processor, the cloud regions, the card networks, the key fintech rails, the call-centre contractor, the print and statement vendor. Score each on concentration, recovery testing evidence and contractual SLAs, and produce a concentration view the Operations Risk Committee and the regulator can both read.

Module 8. Cyber resilience handshake with the CISO

Document where the BCM programme stops and the CISO programme starts, where they overlap, and how the joint runbook works for a destructive cyber event. Includes the integrated decision-tree for declaring an event, the joint communication plan, and the divisional handoff that stops the regulator from finding two unaligned programmes during an exam.

Module 9. Resilience report that the board will read

Build the quarterly Operational Resilience report the Operations Risk Committee and the holding-company board actually want: programme heat map, BIA freshness, runbook coverage, tabletop calendar, third-party concentration, open findings and a forward look. Comes with the speaker notes and the one-slide cover the Chief Risk Officer will want to lift into the board pack.

Module 10. Exam preparation and evidence room

Stand up an FRB BCM exam evidence room that mirrors the SR-letter expectations: programme documents, BIA, runbooks, tabletop after-actions, third-party register, recovery test logs, board reports and policy linkage. Includes the cross-walk between FFIEC BCM appendix items and your folder structure so the exam team finds what they need without your team scrambling.

Module 11. Continuity through a core conversion or vendor migration

Walk through how to keep the continuity programme honest while the bank is mid-conversion: which BIA entries need a transitional state, which runbooks need a dual-state version, how the tabletop calendar adapts, and how the report to the Operations Risk Committee should call out the temporary risk window without scaring the board into pausing the conversion.

Module 12. The next ninety days as the Business Continuity Lead

Convert the course into a dated ninety-day plan: which committee meeting receives which artefact, which line-of-business head signs which BIA section, which runbook is retested in which week, which third-party gets the concentration interview, and which board cycle receives the new resilience report. Hands you a sequenced workplan, not another framework.

How this addresses your situation

Specific modules that map to what you said you are dealing with.

Modules 1, 2 and 9 cover the BIA refresh, the programme heat map and the resilience report the Operations Risk Committee is asking for this quarter.

Modules 3 and 4 cover the wire, ACH, card, retail branch and mortgage servicing runbooks the Treasury Services and Card Operations heads need to sign as tested.

Modules 5, 6 and 10 cover the crisis management framework, the tabletop cadence and the exam evidence room the FRB BCM examination letter will ask for.

Modules 7, 8, 11 and 12 cover third-party concentration, the cyber-resilience handshake with the CISO, continuity through a core conversion, and a sequenced ninety-day plan you can run from Monday.

What you get with this course

Twelve text-based modules in the Art of Service learning environment, self-paced.
Downloadable BIA workbook template aligned to FFIEC BCM appendix categories.
Wire, ACH, card-network, retail branch and mortgage servicing runbook templates.
Tabletop scenario library with after-action template and exam-ready evidence format.
Third-party concentration scoring worksheet with cloud, core and card-network categories pre-loaded.
Quarterly resilience report template for the Operations Risk Committee and the board.
Hand-built implementation playbook delivered alongside course access, anchored to your bank's regulator stack, line-of-business mix and current programme state.
Thirty-day money-back guarantee.

What you will have in hand by Day 1, Week 1, Month 1

Within 24 hours your account in the learning environment is provisioned and the tailored implementation playbook is delivered alongside it.

Weeks one and two: rebuild the BIA against the post-conversion process map and stand up the programme heat map.

Weeks three to six: rewrite wire, ACH, card, retail branch and mortgage servicing runbooks and run the first tabletop of the new cadence.

Weeks seven to ten: third-party concentration view, cyber-resilience handshake with the CISO, exam evidence room.

Weeks eleven to twelve: quarterly resilience report to the Operations Risk Committee and the board cover slide.

Before and after

Before

A BIA that does not match the current process map, runbooks written for the prior core, tabletop after-actions sitting in inboxes, a third-party register that does not show concentration, and a resilience report the team rewrites three times for three audiences each quarter.

After

A programme where the BIA, the runbooks, the tabletop after-actions, the third-party concentration view and the board report all reconcile to the same source of truth, the FRB BCM exam team finds what it needs in the evidence room, and the Treasury Services head signs the wire RTO without an argument.

What happens if you do not address this

FRB BCM examination findings on stale BIAs and untested wire and ACH runbooks land as Matters Requiring Attention and ride the next several supervisory cycles. A core conversion or cloud region outage that hits an unrebuilt programme turns into a remediation MRA on top of the operational event. The Business Continuity Lead seat takes the blame for both.

Who it is for

A Business Continuity Lead inside a US regional bank, sitting between Operations Risk, the line-of-business heads in Treasury Services, Card Operations, Retail and Mortgage Servicing, and the technology resilience team. Owns the BIA, the recovery runbooks, the tabletop cadence, the third-party resilience programme, and the resilience report that the Operations Risk Committee and the holding-company board read. Reports up through Operational Risk or Operations. The regulator stack is the Federal Reserve, the OCC for the lead bank, FFIEC BCM guidance, and the SR letters on third-party and operational resilience.

Who this is NOT for. Not for a CISO running cyber-resilience as the primary domain. Not for a DR engineer focused only on infrastructure failover. Not for a community bank under one billion in assets where the FFIEC BCM workbook is enough. Not for a money-centre bank where operational resilience is a directorate of forty people. This is the regional-bank Business Continuity Lead who owns the programme largely alone, with a steering committee.

How it arrives

Text-based course in the Art of Service learning environment, plus downloadable BIA, runbook, tabletop and resilience-report templates, plus the hand-built implementation playbook delivered alongside course access. Self-paced. No external content required.

Time investment. Roughly two to three hours of reading and template work per module, twelve modules total, runnable over a single quarter alongside the day job.

Why $199 is the right number

Big four advisory engagements rebuild the BIA and runbooks for forty thousand US dollars and up, with the deliverables in the consultancy's house template rather than your bank's. The FFIEC BCM workbook is free and is the right reference, but it is a checklist not a programme rebuild. Internal Audit can flag the gaps but cannot rebuild the artefacts. This course gives the Business Continuity Lead the rebuild path and the templates, with a hand-built implementation playbook anchored to your bank's regulator stack and line-of-business mix.

FAQ

Is this aligned to the current FFIEC BCM appendix and FRB SR-letter expectations?

Yes. The BIA, runbook, tabletop and exam-evidence modules cross-walk explicitly to the FFIEC BCM appendix categories and to the FRB Supervisory Letters on operational resilience and third-party risk.

We are mid core conversion. Is the timing wrong?

The timing is right. Module eleven covers continuity through a core conversion or vendor migration and the implementation playbook will be anchored to your transitional state, not a steady-state assumption.

How does this sit alongside our cyber-resilience programme?

Module eight covers the handshake explicitly: where BCM and the CISO programme overlap, where they hand off, and how the joint runbook works for a destructive cyber event. The goal is a single resilience view the regulator sees.

Who hand-builds the implementation playbook?

Gerard Blokdijk personally, against the role, the regulator stack named here, and the regional-bank line-of-business mix. Delivered alongside course access.

30-day money-back guarantee. If after a week of working through the materials this is not what you needed, reply to the receipt email and a full refund is processed. No questions, no forms.

Within 24 hours your account in the learning environment is provisioned and the tailored implementation playbook is delivered alongside it.