Securities industry regulations require that brokerage firms inform their clients of their plans to address the possibility of a business disruption that potentially results from a power outage, natural disaster, or other event. Folio Financial, Inc., doing business as Goldman Sachs CS Holdings, has a comprehensive business continuity program in place, which we review, update and test on a regular basis. The plan provides for continuation of client service in the event of various types of interruption to our facilities and services, although obviously we cannot plan for or guarantee against all contingencies.

Our policy is to respond to significant business disruptions 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 ensuring that our customers can continue to transact business.

Examples of potential scenarios that might cause some changes to our regular business operations:

  • A power outage due to the power company being unable to supply electricity at our primary facility for almost any reason should not disrupt our service to our customers. Our primary facility has multiple layers of power supply, including battery and diesel generator power supplies.
  • In the event our primary call center became unavailable for any reason, we would transition to a separate back-up location.
  • We maintain a primary center and a back-up facility in separate locations for our data center and our customer service operations, and, in an emergency, can conduct relevant operations from either facility although, depending on the circumstances, on a reduced scale (in some cases, a much-reduced scale) in each case at the back-up facility. Account access would be made available through the back-up location, if necessary.
  • External threats or damage to our primary facility would cause us to transition immediately to our back-up facility with some, but in many cases minimal, disruption to services.

No contingency plan can eliminate all risk of service interruption or temporarily impeded account access. Nevertheless, we assess and update our plans to mitigate risks to the extent reasonable. In creating our Business Continuity & Contingency Plan, certain assumptions have been made such as alternative facilities being accessible, sufficient personnel being available, and external organizations including securities markets and government agencies being operational. If these assumptions are not valid under particular circumstances, we will evaluate possibilities for minimizing the disruption to services feasible at that time and will promptly provide clients with information about how to access their funds and securities.

We will update the Business Continuity & Contingency Plan as needed in the event of changes to our business processes, technology, and staff. We will continue to post updated information on our website. You may also obtain our current Business Continuity & Contingency Plan summary by submitting a written request to:

Goldman Sachs CS Holdings
ATTN: Business Continuity Plan
8180 Greensboro Drive, 8th Floor
McLean, VA 22102