The health and well-being of our staff and our clients is our number one priority. We are currently providing guidance to colleagues on Coronavirus, or COVID-19, with the latest advice provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) as well as local guidance from State and City agencies.
We have a Business Continuity Plan and a Pandemic Plan in place which we are executing. At Lloyds Bank, we continuously focus on agility and remote working arrangements to perform as efficiently as possible for our clients. Effective March 16, all colleagues will begin contingency working arrangements by splitting our New York staff between three separate locations, including teleworking, in order to mitigate the risks of potential cross contamination amongst our colleagues and/or any business interruption. We have instructed that colleagues from these three distinct colleague pools may not co-mingle with each other for any client visits.
Additionally, we have suspended internal branch-wide events and limited attendance at internal meetings and colleagues will not be attending external meetings or conferences until further notice. We have also implemented restrictions on face to face meetings with clients in an effort to keep all colleagues and clients safe. As an alternative to face to face meetings at this time we are recommending that our colleagues conduct their client meetings via telephone or WebEx until further notice.
With this infrastructure in place, we aim to continue to provide service to our clients at the highest level. The colleague split arrangement will remain in effect until March 31, 2020, however we are reviewing this constantly and this may be modified or extended depending on circumstances as we continue to monitor this situation closely.
Lloyds Bank