How does a financial regulator prepare for a sector-wide crisis?

We work with a North American financial regulator client to help them prepare and deliver an annual crisis communications exercise in order to:

• Train team members in the key best practices of crisis communications
• Road test scenario-specific communications strategy and messaging materials to identify any gaps or vulnerabilities 

We work with the client planning team to select and develop a scenario that will enable them to achieve their objectives, and iterate this through liaison with internal subject specialists to ensure that we layer in technical details to make the scenario as authentic as possible. Given the remit of the client, we devise a scenario (e.g. bank failure, risk of contagion etc.) with sector-wide impacts that will allow them to test the different aspects of their communications effort, including:

• Issuing updates and guidance to impacted customers using social media and traditional media formats
• Proactively managing misinformation-driven impacts
• Providing technical briefings to members of the media

We use our innovative Social Simulator platform to bring the scenario to life and to enable the client team to react to real-time injects delivered using lifelike recreations of email, social and traditional media. Working alongside client subject specialist role-players, we form an exercise ‘Red Team’ to interact dynamically with the client team being tested, supplementing the injects being delivered via our platform with role-played calls intended to recreate the range and nuance of stakeholder interactions that the team would expect to encounter in a real-world incident.

Stress-test pre-prepared materials to identify gaps in ‘peacetime’

These exercises provide the client with the opportunity to put their people and their processes through their paces, with any gaps or vulnerabilities being summarised in a concise evaluation report after the exercise has concluded. This combines a summary of key observations and recommendations for how any issues can be resolved. All this helps the client to ensure that they are ‘match-fit’ for any challenge that may present itself.

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