ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – PSCU Card Services, the card servicing cooperative for over 500 credit unions that process their card transactions with First Data Corporation, reported that its business continuity plan performed properly during Hurricane Charley. The cooperative put the plan into place beginning on August 11 when it appeared that Hurricane Charley might have an impact on the CUSO's St. Petersburg, Florida headquarters. By August 13 local authorities had issued a mandatory evacuation order which covered the CUSO's St. Petersburg facility and the organization had entirely switched its operations to its Western facility in Phoenix, Arizona. "Essentially, it worked entirely as it was supposed to," said Todd Slater, director of creative media services for the cooperative and the point man for the development of the plan. The plan is a series of step-by-step instructions that takes each part of the CUSO's operations though the procedures that need to be completed for the cooperative to keep functioning in a disaster. Previously the plan was enacted when power outages took the CUSO's operations in Florida offline, Slater said, but this was the first time when PSCU enacted the plan with the expectation that it might be in place through the recovery phase. "Obviously we are relieved to not have to have gone through recovery," Slater said, "but we are confident that the plan would have functioned well there as well." The cooperative maintains a crisis management team that is offsite during disasters and which exists to deal with problems either enacting the plan or with problems that arise which the plan could not have anticipated, Slater explained. -

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