The Reserve Bank of India on 16th March 2020 has issued an advisory to banks and financial institutions to take measures and put in place business continuity plans to prevent any disruption of services due to coronavirus outbreak.
The RBI has advised banks to take the following measures as part of their existing operational and business continuity plans:
- Banks should devise a strategy and monitoring mechanism to track the spread of the disease within the organisation and timely interventions for preventing further spread in case of detection of infected employees including travel plans and quarantine requirements.
- Banks to take stock of critical processes and revisiting business continuity plan (BCP) with the aim of continuity in critical interfaces and preventing any disruption of services, due to absenteeism either driven by the individual cases of infections or preventive measures.
- Banks should also encourage their customers to use digital banking facilities as far as possible.
- Sharing important instructions/ strategy recieved from health department with the staff members at all levels.
Besides taking steps as above for ensuring business process resilience, supervised entities should also assess the impact on their balance sheet, asset quality, liquidity, etc. arising out of potential scenarios such as further spread of COVID-19 in India.
Click here to read the Notification.
