WHAT IF YOUR BRANCH BURNED DOWN TOMORROW?

Business continuity & archive protection

What if your branch burned down tomorrow?

Remember Marie, Aïcha's advisor who became branch manager? Three months after her appointment, her phone rings at 4am.

Galaxy Conseils • Banking & financial institutions sector

When she arrives on site, firefighters are still battling the flames. No one is hurt, which is what matters most. But looking at the blackened facade, Marie counts what was inside: the files of more than two thousand clients, loan contracts, guarantees, mandates, ten years of archives.

In the hours that follow, the questions pile up, and none have a simple answer. How can clients be served this very morning? How do you know exactly which files were destroyed? How do you answer the insurer, who's asking for an inventory? And how do you explain to the regulator that documents the bank was required to keep no longer exist?

The following weeks are spent rebuilding files, client by client. Advisors spend their days on the phone asking for documents again. Some clients grow frustrated. Others leave.

Among them, Aïcha. Her business was due to pay her employees' salaries the week of the fire, and no one could process her transactions in time.

Business continuity is prepared before the disaster

No bank can guarantee a fire will never happen. But every bank can decide today what a fire would be allowed to cost it tomorrow. A bank that has digitized its archives, organized them, and keeps them in a secure cloud, with automatic backups, no longer bets its memory on how sturdy a building is. Its documents live elsewhere, intact, and accessible from anywhere.

1 6am Logs into M-Files

2 8am Team resettled

3 Morning Clients redirected

4 Insurer & regulator reassured

At 6am, Marie opens her laptop at home and logs into M-Files. Every banking file is there: account openings, contracts, ID documents, supporting records, correspondence, mandates. Continuously backed up in the cloud, they were never inside the branch.

At 8am, her team sets up at the neighboring branch. Every advisor finds their files and ongoing tasks exactly where they left them.

During the morning, clients are notified and redirected to the neighboring branch. Operations resume.

For the insurer and the regulator, Marie can demonstrate that the archives are intact and that retention obligations are met.

That same day, Aïcha's company payroll is processed as planned. Her employees are paid on time. Aïcha hears about the fire on the radio, and calls Marie to offer her support.

Why M-Files is different

A traditional backup lets you recover files, at best, after hours or days of restoration. With M-Files hosted in the cloud, there's nothing to restore: files are always available, organized, linked to their clients, with their approval workflows and full history.

On the day of a disaster, teams don't work in degraded mode: they work normally, just from a different place.

Fire, flood, theft: the risks change, but the response stays the same. The bank's memory no longer depends on a building.