US regulators have published details of banks' plans for living wills, including information on how the organisations' IT systems will cope if they are shut down or broken up.
Living wills, required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, are designed to prevent future too-big-to-fail bailouts of banks by setting out plans for letting them go to the wall without catastrophic knock-on effects.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Federal Reserve have now made public parts of the plans submitted by nine of the country's biggest banks: Bank of America, Barclays, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and UBS.
The documents submitted by each include details on relationships with payment, clearing and settlement systems and brief descriptions of 'material management information systems' outlining the business continuity and disaster recovery plans in place.
Among the nine, Citi is unique in having used the living wills issue to develop a tool that "leverages the standards-based data architecture and is intended to make Citi's resolution plan a living plan with monthly and quarterly updates as well as to provide a streamlined method to answer questions relating to resolution."
The tool "incorporates the use of strategic data repositories, e.g. consolidated contracts, positions and balances information, and gives Citi and its regulators the ability to access the information that would be needed in a crisis situation."
With UK banks also being asked to draw up living wills, Finextra is hosting an executive-level dinner on the subject with Sir John Vickers, chairman of the Independent Commission on Banking, on 17th July. Register now.