The Bank, the Insurer and the Accountant

These are not suppliers in the ordinary sense. Each holds information you need and requires arrangements that take time to change.

Putting the controls in “The Bank, the Insurer and the Accountant” into practice requires ownership that survives absence and can be reviewed without relying on memory. Teams can use work-hour tracking software to see how responsibility and working time are distributed around recurring tasks, while keeping credentials and sensitive records in authorised systems and limiting activity data to a proportionate operational purpose.

For an independent benchmark, compare the local approach with CISA account security guidance; the useful test is whether ownership, access and recovery remain proportionate and explainable when the usual expert is absent.

The bank

What to arrange: a second signatory, a second person with online access at the right permission level, and knowledge of who your relationship manager is.

What to write down: account numbers, what each account is for, standing orders and direct debits and what they pay for, and the mandate arrangement.

The trap: online banking access that is not the same as mandate authority. People discover during an emergency that their second person can see but not act.

The insurer

What to arrange: knowledge of what is covered, by whom, renewing when.

What to write down: policy numbers, broker contact, renewal dates, and the notification requirements — which are the part that catches people.

The trap: conditions requiring notification of material changes. A key person leaving can be a material change in some policies, and failing to notify can affect a later claim.

Check whether any policy names an individual.

The accountant

What to arrange: a second contact at your organisation who they will speak to.

What to write down: who they are, what they do and do not handle, deadlines they manage and deadlines they do not, and where the records are.

The trap: assuming they hold copies of everything. Frequently they hold what you sent and not what you did not.

Ask directly what they would and would not be able to reconstruct.

The pattern across all three

Each relationship is held by one person, usually the owner.

Each requires a process to change, involving forms and identification.

And each holds part of your organisation's memory, which means they are also a resource: your accountant may be able to tell a successor things nobody internally knows.

The introduction

Have a second person meet each of them once.

A single meeting, or a call, with the second person on it.

It costs an hour in total and it means somebody has a name and a face when it matters.

The folder

One place holding: bank details and mandate, insurance policies and renewal dates, accountant's contact and scope, and the company's own registration documents.

Physical or digital, and known to more than one person.

This is the folder a successor, an executor or a covering colleague will look for first, and in most small organisations it does not exist.

What to check

Does a second person have real authority at the bank, not just visibility?

Does any insurance policy name an individual or require notification of departures?

Has anybody but the owner spoken to the accountant?

And is there one folder holding all of this?

The point

Online banking visibility is not mandate authority.

People discover the difference during an emergency.

Underlying all of this

Everything in this collection reduces to four habits: know where the dependence sits, do the cheap fixes first, use the absences that already happen as rehearsals, and decide deliberately about what remains. None of it requires a framework, a tool or a consultant, and an organisation that does those four things consistently is substantially harder to damage than one with a succession document nobody has read.

The recurring pattern

The recurring pattern across every section here is the same: dependence forms through sensible individual decisions, becomes invisible because it feels like reliability, and is addressed only after it has cost something. The work that prevents that is small, continuous and unglamorous, which is exactly why it gets deferred.