Business Continuity 

Protect your credit union from disruptions with proven continuity planning, expert guidance, and compliant strategies that build trust, reduce risk, and keep operations running—no matter what.
 
Trusted by Credit Unions
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Testimonials

What Our Customers
Say About Optiri

 
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"There’s scores of vendors that we work with, and there’s not many I can think of that I truly trust the way I do Trellance [now Optiri]."

 

Christopher Newell
Vice President of Information Technology
NIH Federal Credit Union

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"We are happy with what we are getting from Trellance [now Optiri]- a trustworthy partner who’s providing us with tools and who we truly believe wants to do the right thing by our credit union."

 

Greg Bowman
Chief Technology Officer
Nymeo Federal Credit Union

Business Continuity Management (BCM) for Credit Unions

Minimize Downtime, Safeguard Member Trust and Build Resiliency Benefit

Optiri BCM ensures that credit unions can recover quickly from operational disruption, averting prolonged downtime and maintaining operational continuity and resiliency. Develop a program to help mitigate risks, assist during small or large business disruptions and disasters and meet regulatory requirements. 

  • You will be assigned a dedicated certified Business Continuity Professional to guide you through the process.
  • No matter if you need assistance starting from square one or need help with regulatory compliance, our Business Continuity Certified Professional staff will assist your credit union with all your needs.
  • Our cloud-based portal, CU Recover and Crisis Management Notification System are included in the Business Continuity as a Service and Business Continuity Standard solutions.
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Business Continuity as a Service (BCaaS)

Complete Continuity Management

End-to-end business continuity planning, testing, and support delivered by an Optiri expert to ensure compliance, operational resilience, and member confidence. 

  • Dedicated certified continuity professional, who develops, manages, and updates your plan year-round.
  • Periodic testing, guidance, and ongoing maintenance to ensure compliance with NCUA, FFIEC and state regulations while keeping you audit-ready without burdening internal resources.
  • Hands-on support during disruptions to protect operations and member confidence, that reinforces trust with regulators and members alike.
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Business Impact Analysis

Identify What Matters Most and Plan Accordingly

Pinpoint your credit union’s most critical operations to prioritize recovery efforts and minimize disruption impact.

  • Identify essential functions and the impact of their potential downtime.
  • Guide recovery strategies with data-driven prioritization and risk insights.
  • Improve operational resilience while meeting regulatory planning requirements.
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Crisis Management Team Plan Development and Testing

Build and Validate Executive-Level Crisis Readiness

Develop and validate your Crisis Management Team’s ability to lead effectively under pressure and protect your credit union’s future.

  • Create a tailored crisis response plan with clearly defined roles and escalation paths.
  • Conduct facilitated exercises to test decision-making and response readiness.
  • Build confidence in your team’s ability to manage real-time disruptions.
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Business Continuity: What Credit Unions Need to Know

Business continuity keeps essential credit union operations running during a disruption. Disaster recovery is the part of that plan focused on restoring technology systems and data. For example, a continuity plan may direct members to alternate service channels while IT restores online banking.

A disruption can interrupt members’ access to accounts, payments, and support. A tested continuity plan gives employees clear roles, identifies workarounds, and sets recovery priorities so they can keep serving members during outages, severe weather, cyber incidents, or vendor failures.

Optiri’s certified continuity professionals can help your credit union identify critical services, develop plans that reflect how your teams operate, and test how leaders respond to realistic disruptions. The results give your team a clear set of gaps to address before an incident.

Review the program at least annually and revisit it after major changes to systems, vendors, staffing, or member services. Use lessons from exercises and actual incidents to update team assignments, workarounds, and recovery priorities.

A continuity plan helps your credit union keep essential services available where possible and give members clear alternatives when a service is disrupted. Timely updates about what’s affected, what members can still do, and when they’ll hear more help them make informed decisions.

Optiri’s Business Continuity as a Service (BCaaS) provides a dedicated certified professional who serves as your continuity administrator. They develop, manage, and update your plan year-round, coordinate periodic testing, and provide support during disruptions. The service also includes CU Recover and Optiri’s Crisis Management Notification System.

BCaaS can help when your credit union needs ongoing continuity support and has limited internal time to keep plans current, coordinate exercises, or prepare staff. It can also help when a system conversion or vendor change creates new recovery dependencies for the team to manage.

Business Continuity Standard provides professional guidance to help a credit union develop, review, and test a continuity plan tailored to its operations. 

Guided reviews and testing help teams identify outdated contacts, unclear responsibilities, and workarounds that no longer fit how the credit union operates. Teams can use those findings to update the plan and clarify what staff should do during a disruption.

Business Continuity Standard focuses on guided plan development, review, and testing. BCaaS provides a dedicated Optiri professional who serves as the credit union’s continuity administrator, manages the plan year-round, and supports the team during disruptions.

A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) evaluates what happens when a credit union’s services or processes are interrupted. It identifies essential functions, measures how downtime affects members and operations over time, and shows what each function depends on to resume.

Include critical functions and their owners, the people, systems, data, facilities, and vendors they depend on, and the member, financial, operational, and regulatory effects of downtime. Use those findings to set recovery priorities, target restoration times, and acceptable data loss where applicable.

A BIA helps leaders determine which services need to resume first and which systems must be restored to support them. For example, a disruption to payments may have a more immediate member impact than a delay in internal reporting. The BIA also helps teams identify shared systems or vendors that need to recover before either service can resume.

Review the BIA at least annually and update it when significant changes affect how the credit union operates. A core conversion, a new payments vendor, or a change in branch operations can alter service dependencies and recovery targets.

Keep a current continuity plan, BIA, and risk assessment alongside exercise results, vendor testing evidence where applicable, and records of management and board oversight. Track each gap identified during an exercise or incident, including who owns the fix, when it’s due, and how the credit union verified it was resolved.

A Crisis Management Team Plan defines how credit union leaders coordinate a response during a major disruption. It spells out when to activate the team, who can make decisions, how issues escalate, and who coordinates with staff, vendors, and members.

Assess which services are affected, confirm who is leading the response, and set immediate priorities for member access and operational recovery. Coordinate actions across departments and vendors, approve communications, and keep a record of decisions as the situation changes.

Run a facilitated exercise that gives leaders realistic updates as a scenario unfolds. During a simulated online banking outage, for example, ask the team to decide when to escalate, what alternatives members can use, and who approves the first public update. Document any gaps, assign follow-up actions, and retest the decisions that caused delays.

A tabletop exercise is a guided discussion in which staff explain how they would respond to a simulated disruption. A functional test has staff carry out a specific procedure, such as sending an alert through a backup channel or restoring a system from backup. The two methods test different aspects of readiness.

Share what’s affected, which services are still available, and when members can expect the next update. Use channels that remain available, such as a status page, mobile app notice, or recorded phone message, and give branch and contact center staff the same information. If the restoration time is uncertain, give members a time for the next update.