Terror in Tampines?

The financial sector in Singapore was terrorized by last month's "IWE" (Industry Wide Exercise) staged by British KPMG consultants for the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).

The ABS and MAS promised to strike fear into the hearts of Lion City bankers in a four-hour "table-top" exercise on Tuesday afternoon, May 9. The crisis management teams of 100-plus participating financial entities had been furiously shining up their contingency plans to get ready. Senior BCP, crisis management and security officers flew in for the event.

No one wanted to be left out, but--more importantly--no one wanted to lose "face" by publicly stumbling.

One banker told me the MAS had one hundred --100!--employees working on this exercise, and that the MAS--not the KPMG folks--dreamed up the exercise scenario. That was scary, because the MAS knows where every bank has its data centres and recovery sites--information not available to the average terrorist.

So, if you were a fanatical financial regulator and you were trying to stress-test your banking industry, what scenario would you have devised? My most-diabolical predictions were:

1. you'd try to cause a liquidity crisis by disrupting the payments system

2. you'd try to disrupt trading in the Singapore securities and derivatives markets (both operated by Singapore Exchange Ltd)

3. to cause those consequences, you'd create multiple, sequential events, like the coordinated attacks on London’s underground last July

4. to disrupt trading, you'd have one (or more) of the events occur at Raffles Place where broking and banking are concentrated (a high-visibility, symbolic target)

5. to disrupt the payment system, you'd have one (or more) of the events in quiet, suburban Tampines, where several big banks have their operations "back offices" (a low-visibility but high-impact target)

6. to sprinkle salt in the wounds, you'd disrupt voice communication--in particular, the mobile phone network, so communication (and therefore coordination) would be difficult

So here's a map of Tampines Central where I'd have suggested an explosion occur. I'd NOT make it a terror event (very unlikely in Tampines); instead, I'd have an underground gas line accidentally punctured during construction, for example.

I participated in the exercise, and I'll confess the accuracy of my predictions in a subsequent post.

I can report that the organizers threw a cocktail party at the Mandarin Hotel on Orchard Road after the event to ease the pain and suffering of the participants.

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Nathaniel Forbes

Nathaniel Forbes is the director of Forbes Calamity Prevention, a Singapore-based consulting firm providing business continuity, crisis management and emergency response advice and training to multinational companies, with a focus on companies with offices in Asia. The firm is 10 years old. FCP's current and past clients include Singapore Exchange Ltd, OCBC Bank, AXA Insurance, The Gillette Company, Siemens and ABN Amro Bank. A former President of the Singapore Computer Society’s Business Continuity Group, Nathaniel passed the DRII’s Certified Business Continuity Planner (CBCP) examination in 1997. He has lived, traveled or worked in Asia since 1973.