BC in the Cloud® helps WEX, Inc. achieve operational resilience

BC in the Cloud® helps WEX, Inc. achieve operational resilience

Preparation, planning, and communication yield positive outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

With more than 40 offices in 15 countries and nearly 5,200 employees worldwide, WEX, Inc. provides payment solutions to businesses of all sizes across a wide spectrum of sectors. From fleet and corporate payments to travel and health, this leading financial technology service provider simplifies complex payment systems and delivers insights that help its customers make smart, data-driven business decisions. WEX, Inc. is a publicly traded $1.5B revenue company with a $7B market capitalization. The company provides services in the United States, Canada, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Challenges

A commitment to business continuity

With limited capabilities from its existing business continuity and disaster recovery software, WEX began researching alternative solutions in 2017. The rapidly growing company needed a system that was flexible, scalable, provided greater reporting capabilities, and offered a positive end-user experience.

WEX narrowed its initial research of dozens of vendors down to five companies, then to three, and ultimately selected BC in the Cloud® by Infinite Blue.

“We’re really trying to embed a dynamic planning capability into the business units,” said Lori Norman, Director of Organizational Resilience at WEX. “With BC in the Cloud, the units are able to execute the planning process, allowing my team to manage and ensure we don’t fall behind. This increased our ability to meet our regulatory requirements and identify risk.”

As WEX continued to grow, so did its commitment to business continuity planning. Norman had noticed that plans were only being updated on an annual basis and understood that nothing good comes from a stale plan.

“With the way we’ve adapted the methodology, we focus on impact scenarios,” said Norman. “We would plan for loss of facility, loss of staff, loss of utilities, and loss of technology. We always had those four different scenarios, and we built that into a single, complete view. They’re also using the analysis functions, and BC in the Cloud helps with risk identification, mitigation, and planning prior to making changes.”

“We have created a more holistic planning process in view with the changes in the software. I feel like, had we not made the move to the new software, we probably would have had a lot of stale continuity plans. BC in the Cloud allowed us to keep up and have fresh, current plans,” she concluded.

Solutions

Putting the BC plan to the ultimate test

In mid-January 2020, while Norman was in WEX’s Netherlands office conducting a business impact analysis (BIA), she began receiving alerts and quickly realized an issue was arising. Using situational awareness tools, risk monitoring tools, and various news services, Norman began contacting senior leadership to discuss what she was seeing and hearing.

WEX aligned strategic resources and made rapid decisions to stabilize operations and minimize risk to employees, business operations, customers, and communities worldwide. In February, business continuity plans were proactively activated globally, which enabled WEX to respond to the needs of its employees in real time, creating a foundation that allowed them to seamlessly transition to working from home. WEX continued to care for its customers, communities, and business needs while remaining mindful of the personal circumstances of all involved.

In addition to activating the core crisis management team, Norman also spun up a global pandemic response team, which consisted of Human Resources, IT, Facilities, and executives. Weekly conversations turned to daily conversations, and the planning and preparation that was underway enabled WEX to be about two weeks ahead of global lockdown orders.

“There were so many moving parts, but because of the planning we have put into place over the past five years, and with the help of the BC in the Cloud software, we were able to achieve our objectives,” said Norman.

By leveraging the existing crisis management framework and business continuity plans, the WEX cross-functional pandemic response team was able to respond quickly and effectively to the risks created by COVID-19. The company’s strong continuity capabilities have not only protected and supported its employee base but also put its customer population at ease and provided the opportunity to share its learnings more broadly as a key business competency

Putting the BC plan to the ultimate test

In addition to the work that Norman and her team did to keep leadership and employees abreast of the decisions being made, there were many other stakeholders that needed to be briefed. “Communications in all directions was very, very important,” said Norman. It was important that partners, shareholders, customers, and others were aware of how WEX was managing through the early days of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

“We had a good story to tell. We were able to leverage our response and the story related to it, because we experienced no disruption at all due to our planning and preparation. We were able to provide the confidence to our investors, our partners, and our customers that all was well at WEX!”