Mon, Sep 17, 2001 page24

• Amex bank keeps money moving

  CONTINGENCY PLAN The bank has a backup center in New Jersey but, as the week went on, it became clear the disaster plan had not anticipated the scale of this attack

  • By Saul Hansell / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  In the first stunned moments when the horror of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center slowly registered on the people in lower Manhattan, Madhavan Ramaswamy found something that would later be in very short supply: a taxicab.

  Ramaswamy, a manager for international money transfer at the American Express Bank who works at 7 World Trade Center, was a little late for a meeting there when he saw flames atop the twin towers. Jumping into a cab with three colleagues, he told the driver to head to the bank's backup center, never before used, just over the Hudson River in New Jersey. (American Express, nervous about security, asked that its exact location not be disclosed.) The Lincoln and Holland Tunnels were already closed, but Ramaswamy's group was able to catch a ferry, and by 2pm he arrived in the bank's three narrow rooms.

  With most of the bank's employees scattered around the city -- all, it would turn out, thankfully alive -- Ramaswamy's group met three more colleagues from a New Jersey office, pulled the plastic drop cloths from rows of computers and began rerouting communications from the international banking networks.

  By late Tuesday, they were able to process about 19,000 transfers for a total of US$14.3 billion, roughly 70 percent of the transactions its customers had entered.

  It was a testament to the sort of contingency planning that finger-wagging regulators urge on companies, but that only some do. American Express had established the backup site as part of its preparations for the computer crisis that never came on Jan. 1, 2000.

  Yet, as the week went on and the number of employees taxing the air-conditioning of the three rooms grew to about 90, it became clear that the disaster plan had not anticipated the scale of this disaster. The contingency plan had predicted a need to use the backup site for two weeks; now the company will make its home in New Jersey indefinitely, not just for computer operators but for sales representatives, lawyers and a host of other staff members.

  Even some of the most basic elements of the bank's plan did not anticipate the scope of this disruption. Employees had been told that if their building was evacuated, they should reunite at a nearby public school. But on Tuesday that site seemed perilously close, and most joined the mass of dazed refugees streaming north away from the trade center.

  William J. Blomquist, the managing director of the bank's Financial Institutions Group, was about to convene a staff meeting in his office in the American Express headquarters tower, in the World Financial Center just across West Street from the trade center, when he heard the explosion of the first plane crash.

  "It's hard to stay calm when you see people starting to jump out of windows," Blomquist said on Thursday.

  After the second crash, the American Express tower was evacuated, and Blomquist bumped into Farhad Subjally, another bank executive, who had recently left the bank's operations center in 7 World Trade.

  "I fully thought we would be able to go back into our building in half an hour," Subjally said. "So I was heading over to the World Financial Center to make phone calls."

  Instead, the executives marched north, finding other bank employees as they went along.

  Meanwhile, workers from Electronic Data Systems, the big computer company that operates the bank's systems, were busy trying to get the computer system at the backup center up and running.

  These days, Amex's international payments are so routine that many can be handled without human involvement. These were processed automatically by the main American Express Bank computer at an EDS center in Britain throughout Tuesday. But by 7pm, when Ramaswamy and colleagues finally had the computers in New Jersey linked back to the mainframe in Britain, thousands of transfers that did need human authorization had piled up. Working until 11pm, the team processed all those transactions.

  Although the backup center in New Jersey was equipped with the advanced communication and security equipment needed to transfer huge amounts of money, it was cut off from all other information. There was no television, radio or Internet browser. The backup site was set up to receive email, but the e-mail server in 7 World Trade had been destroyed Tuesday afternoon when that building collapsed.

  "I was totally cut off and didn't know anything other than something bad had happened," Ramas-wamy said. His only information came from telephone calls, when the land lines or cell phones were working. "I was on the phone with a guy in Singapore when he said that he was seeing our office falling on CNN. It was terrible."

  Now that the basic systems are in place, even harder work is beginning to turn what had been meant as a temporary setup into the bank's home for many months ahead.
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