The U.S. securities industry is planning a broad business continuity test for October 15.

The Securities Industry Association, the Bond Market Association and the Futures Industry Association, in coordination with the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp., the Securities Industry Automation Corp. and other organizations, will lead an industry-wide business continuity test on Saturday, October 15.

This so-called “phase 2” test will supplement “phase 1” connectivity tests that have been conducted over the two past years as part of an ongoing industry testing initiative. This test will exercise and verify the ability of firms, markets and utilities to operate through an emergency using backup sites, recovery facilities and backup communications capabilities across the industry.

The test will not simulate an outage in any specific geographic area. Instead, all firms will connect simultaneously from their backup business and technology sites to the markets and industry utilities. Firms will transmit dummy orders to markets and receive simulated execution reports and will conduct certain interactions with DTCC. The test will include components for equities, fixed income, options, futures and settlement.