Federal Reserve Financial Services–Cash Advisory Council – Business Resilience Subcommittee

Cash Advisory Council (led by Federal Reserve Financial Services/FedCash Services and is comprised of the largest financial institutions and national and regional armored carriers in the U.S.)

The Business Resilience Subcommittee works in partnership with the Cash Advisory Council to strengthen the cash ecosystem’s resilience capabilities. The Business Resilience Subcommittee focuses on three key areas: enhancing coordination and relationships among cash ecosystem participants on resilience issues, identifying and sharing crisis management best practices through collaborative exercises and discussions, and promoting resilience awareness and education throughout the cash ecosystem.

A major deliverable of the Business Resilience Subcommittee is the Cash Resiliency Playbook. The Cash Resiliency Playbook is a collaborative tool, first developed in 2019 by the Cash Advisory Council’s Business Resilience Subcommittee to strengthen the entire cash ecosystem’s ability to respond to disruptions. The Cash Resiliency Playbook is designed to provide best practices to manage events that have cascading impacts on the distribution of cash with the goal of improving resiliency in the cash ecosystem. It is intended to be a living document, open to ongoing revision and updates as the landscape and response to cash ecosystem disruptions continue to evolve. The most recent version was published in December 2025 and includes an update for hurricane best practices after several hurricanes devastated the east coast in 2024.

The Business Resilience Subcommittee and the Playbook create greater coordination and strengthen relationships on issues of common or shared interest related to business resiliency, identify and share business resilience and crisis management best practices across member organizations, and foster overall business resilience awareness and education within the cash ecosystem.

United States of America

The Business Resilience Subcommittee has enhanced cash cycle resilience in the United States by creating standardized response protocols across the entire cash ecosystem through the development of the Cash Resiliency Playbook. It addresses critical vulnerabilities by focusing on four key disruption impacts:

• Inability to physically distribute cash
• Inability to order cash
• Unavailability of workforce
• Inability to supply enough cash to meet demand

Since implementation, the Cash Resiliency Playbook has been successfully activated in response to multiple events with varied magnitude of impacts, including hurricanes, wildfires, typhoons, and the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, the Cash Resiliency Playbook states that FedCash Services will convene an industry call at 1 pm local time to better communicate and coordinate responses in the impacted region with financial institutions and armored carriers. During the pandemic, FedCash Services convened an industry call nationwide to coordinate efforts related to cash demand and distribution. Industry participants from the pandemic experience shared universally that they were thankful for those industry calls and that the pandemic struggles would have been more challenging without them.

The structured response framework has reduced response times and improved coordination during critical incidents.

The Business Resilience Subcommittee serves the entire cash ecosystem through its inclusive membership structure:

• Federal Reserve Financial Services/ FedCash Services
• Reserve Bank District Cash
• CAC member financial institutions
• CAC member armored carriers

In addition to the formal membership – the Business Resilience Subcommittee supports retailers and consumers. By protecting the cash ecosystem’s integrity during disruptions, the Business Resilience Subcommittee ensures that communities—including underbanked, rural, and disaster-affected populations—maintain access to currency when they need it most.

The Business Resilience Subcommittee is designed for long-term sustainability with a charter that undergoes review every three years. The Subcommittee maintains documentation of best practices, recommended exercises, training programs, and other business continuity initiatives deemed appropriate. This structured approach ensures that resilience strategies remain relevant and effective.

The Business Resilience Subcommittee model can be replicated by other central banks and cash stakeholders globally, as it provides a framework for collaborative industry-wide resilience planning that adapts to each region’s specific needs and risks.

The Playbook is designed as a living document with a structured update process. Each iteration incorporates lessons learned from real-world events, tabletop exercises, and after-action reports ensuring the Playbook remains relevant and effective. The modular design allows for easy addition of new appendices addressing specific scenarios.

he Business Resilience Subcommittee (BRS) demonstrates  creative problem solving in its comprehensive approach to cash ecosystem resilience through structured collaboration: regular calls, biannual face-to-face meetings, and clear governance with co-chairs from the Federal Reserve, armored carriers, and financial institutions. This framework facilitates consistent knowledge exchange and relationship-building across sectors.

Key Business Resilience Subcommittee deliverables include the Cash Resiliency Playbook, which employs a flexible matrix approach organizing response actions by participant type (FRBs, financial institutions, armored carriers). Rather than rigid protocols for every possible scenario, the Playbook focuses on common elements and impacts structured around disruption phases (before, during, after) with comprehensive communication frameworks and specialized scenario appendices.

The Business Resilience Subcommittee strengthens implementation through ecosystem-wide tabletop exercises that validate protocols under realistic conditions, identify improvement opportunities, and build institutional muscle memory for crisis response. These exercises occur a minimum once every two years. Most recently,  the Q4 2025 ransomware exercise exemplified this approach, simulating a multi-day outage affecting a major armored carrier and testing cross-sector coordination strategies.

This anticipatory rather than reactive methodology, coupled with detailed after-action review processes, creates a continuously improving resilience program that adapts to emerging threats while maintaining consistent response capabilities across the entire cash ecosystem.

The Business Resilience Subcommittee exemplifies cross-industry collaboration involving the major players in the United States Cash ecosystem. The Subcommittee’s membership includes representatives from the Cash Advisory Council member organizations, Federal Reserve’s FedCash Services, and Reserve Bank representatives.

This multi-stakeholder approach ensures comprehensive coverage of all aspects of the cash ecosystem. The documentation created by the subcommittee includes specific protocols for how these entities should communicate and coordinate during disruptions, with detailed matrices for each participant type.