Risk management has an important role as part of the corporate governance of companies in the financial industry, as these are always dealing with risk analysis and the possibility of potential losses in their operations. Thus, this article aims to analyze the ability of firms in the financial industry have to answer a total crisis interruption event in its main sites of operation. For the purpose of the article, was held a qualitative multiple case studies in four national and foreign financial institutions operating in the Brazilian financial system, in different sizes and operations. The results show that, for large financial institutions, which are usually multiple retail banks, they invest heavily not only in corporate governance and information security, but also to implement operational risk management policies, redundant infrastructure and testing to validate if this investment will, in fact, to respond to any major crisis event. For the institutions that do not have demand availability 24 hours a day online operations, less investment is required in alternative sites, technological environment replication and redundancy of critical systems. It can be concluded that there is a great distance from the multiple retail banks, with regard to investments in IT governance and operational risk management, which obtained high performance, compared to other institutions surveyed.