H&L Equities, LLC has in place a Business Continuity Plan in the event of a significant business disruption (SBD). SBDs can vary in their scope, such as, only our firm, a single building housing our firm, the business district where our firm is located, the city where we are located, or the whole region. Within each of these areas, the severity of the disruption can also vary from minimal to severe. Our 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.
In the event of an internal or external SBD, our firm intends to quickly recover and resume business operations and respond by safeguarding our personnel and property, making a financial and operational assessment, and quickly recovering and resuming operations. In short, our business continuity plan is designed to permit our firm to resume operations as quickly as possible, given the scope and severity of the significant business disruption. In the event of an internal disruption, we expect to recover and resume business within 1 to 2 days. In the event of an external disruption, we expect to recover and resume business within 3 to 5 days. Our clients are provided with a full complement of records related to their shareholders and if the SBD is so severe that it prevents us from remaining in business, the issuers will take over responsibility for maintaining shareholder accounts. We do not hold customer funds or securities; therefore, access to funds and securities is not an issue.
Our Business Continuity Plan addresses: data storage and recovery, financial and operational assessment including compliance with capital requirements and funding of operations, alternative means of communicating with customers, personnel, business constituents and regulators, alternate physical location of personnel, and regulatory reporting.
All business-critical data is continuously backed up and stored daily in a remote, hardened data center by an independent servicing company. A cold spare application/data/file server is stored offsite and could be operational within 48 hours.
Our e-mail capabilities should remain intact because the Company utilizes an independent servicing company which provides services out of a secure data center with physical access controls. Therefore, e-mail access will continue to be available.
Phone calls and voicemails will be forwarded from our main number to our mobile numbers. In the event of an SBD, please call us at (404) 892-3300 or e-mail us at info@reit-funding.com.
If you would like a copy of our full Business Continuity Plan, please contact us at (404) 892-3300.