The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has issued revised guidelines on business continuity management for financial institutions. The revisions take into account learnings from the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and increased digitalization in the financial sector.
The Business Continuity Management Guidelines provide new insights on measures that financial institutions can take to better manage the increasingly complex operating environment and threat landscape to enable the continuous delivery of services to their customers.
The guidelines introduce principles and practices that financial institutions can implement to strengthen their operational resilience.
Under the revised guidelines, financial institutions should:
- Adopt a service-centric approach through timely recovery of critical business services facing customers;
- Identify end-to-end dependencies that support critical business services, and address any gaps that could hinder the effective recovery of such services; and
- Enhance threat monitoring and environmental scanning, and conduct regular audits, tests, and industry exercises.
The guidelines took into account feedback from two rounds of public consultation.
