The rapid outbreak of coronavirus (Covid-19) has turned a medical emergency into a global macroeconomic crisis, causing market volatility and reshaping the world of work as millions of employees stay away from their offices to comply with social distancing rules.

Emergency contingency plans have long been a regulatory obligation for financial services firms, but the current disruption caused by coronavirus is a force majeure of unparalleled quantity.

Such recovery plans usually focus on a short-term incident such as a hack or a terrorist attack, but the unprecedented nature of the current situation has left firms in the position of having to plan for six months or more of uncertainty.

Businesses have turned to technology to solve the problem of how to continue operating, with remote video conferencing from Zoom and Microsoft Teams reporting enormous spikes in user numbers.

Financial institutions in particular are looking to technology to continue serving their clients with immediate needs, such as those currently undergoing annual audits.

You might expect that the current work from home situation would mean a slowdown in audit confirmation requests. But it is likely to be quite the opposite. Britain's accounting watchdog, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), has warned companies and auditors that they must disclose the impact the coronavirus is having on business, stressing the importance of robust audits during this period.

?Given the growing impact of coronavirus on the global economy and the high degree of uncertainty, high-quality audits are vital to ensure users of financial statements are properly informed,? said David Rule, the FRC's Executive Director of Supervision. ?In many instances, auditors will need to consider developing alternative audit procedures to gather sufficient, appropriate audit evidence.?

In order to acquire that appropriate audit evidence and combat the fraud that inevitably comes with a downturn in the economy, auditors will turn to online confirmation technology. This is because it is currently one of the few safe, trusted ways to obtain necessary audit evidence.

An online confirmation platform, such as Confirmation, brings the entire process online, making audit confirmation requests easy to initiate and respond to, even if audit and bank employees are working remotely. With such platforms, the available API (application programming interface) can work with a bank's processes to essentially automate the entire response process.

Responding to audit confirmations can be an arduous task even in normal times, especially if you rely on mail or fax for these transactions. It's time to relinquish this, and any other, paper-based process in favour of more modern online methods. Even at a time such as this, when it certainly isn't business as usual, banks using this technology are reporting that this aspect of their work is working well.

Technologies such as these which ensure business continuity are valuable and it is an area where banks simply cannot afford to be late adopters.

From the 1987 and 2008 financial crises to 9/11, the 2010 volcanic ash cloud to the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and now Covid-19, major international incidents teach many businesses harsh lessons about being unprepared.

Despite the current uncertainly, the technology to ensure business continuity for financial institutions exists, and the importance of leveraging it to future proof against such global crises cannot be understated. Careful planning can mitigate the effects of disruption and allow the business to continue to function or to return to normal more quickly.

Confirmation pioneered the idea of digital confirmations in 2000 and still leads the industry today. More than 16,000 audit firms, 4,000 banks and departments, and 5,000 law firms have put our platform to work. We span 170 countries and process more than one trillion dollars in confirmations each year.