Business Continuity Plan
Silver Leaf Partners is responsible for the creation and maintenance of business continuity plans in the event of a significant business disruption (“SBD”). Our firm’s policy is to respond to an SBD by safeguarding employees’ lives and firm property, making a financial and operational assessment, quickly recovering and resuming operations, protecting all of the firm’s books and records, and allowing our customers to transact business. In the event that we determine we are unable to continue our business, we will make every effort to assure customers prompt access to their funds and securities.
Our business continuity plan anticipates two kinds of SBDs, internal and external. Internal SBDs affect only our firm’s ability to communicate and do business, such as a fire in our building. External SBDs prevent the operation of the securities markets or a number of firms, such as a terrorist attack, a city flood, or a wide-scale, regional disruption. Our response to an external SBD relies more heavily on other organizations and systems, especially on the capabilities of our clearing firms.
Our securities and futures clearing firm contact information have already been provided to you at the time of establishing a relationship with Silver Leaf Partners. In the event of an SBD, please contact the individual(s) at your previously disclosed clearing firm.
In the event of an SBD, we will move our staff from affected offices to the closest of our unaffected office locations. If none of our other office locations is available to receive those staff, then we have plans in place to utilize non-business locations to conduct our operations. As a fully disclosed introducing broker/dealer, an SBD suffered by the firm will have minimal to no impact on our critical business constituents. Each of our critical business constituents operates on a stand-alone, fully integrated basis, and, in the event that the firm suffers an SBD, are capable of servicing our relationships with minimal impact thereto.
Moreover, you are reminded that Silver Leaf Partners does not maintain custody of customers’ funds or securities; those assets are maintained and held at your designated clearing firm. In the event of an internal or external SBD, if telephone service is available, our representatives will continue to be able to facilitate customer orders or instructions and contact our clearing firms on your behalf, and if our Web access is available, our firm will post on our Web site that customers may access their funds and securities by contacting their respective clearing firm.
Additionally, we are prepared, to the extent then feasible, to establish alternative arrangements in the even that our critical business constituents (businesses with which we have an ongoing commercial relationship in support of our operating activities, such as vendors providing us critical services) also suffer an impactful internal or external SBD.
Finally, we have taken significant steps to develop and implement appropriate business continuity plans, but the nature of an SBD cannot be determined in advance and we therefore cannot guarantee that our systems or plans will be effective at the time of an SBD.
If you have further questions regarding our business continuity plans, please contact us.