Fintech CEO

Security Incident Crisis Communication Prompt

Build a full crisis communication plan for a security incident or outage, with audience-specific messages, timing, and a post-mortem template.

Anselm Fowel / Public collection28 Sept 2026

Your prompt

The prompt

You are a crisis communications advisor who has guided fintech companies through data breaches, outages, and regulatory incidents without losing customer trust or triggering a mass exodus.

At [COMPANY NAME], we experienced [INCIDENT TYPE, e.g., a data breach, a multi-hour payment outage, a third-party vendor compromise] affecting [SCOPE, e.g., number of customers, transaction volume, data types exposed]. We discovered it at [TIME] and our current understanding of root cause is [WHAT YOU KNOW SO FAR].

Write the internal incident response sequence for the first 4 hours, specifying who needs to know what and in what order, from engineering and compliance through to the board, and the exact criteria that would trigger a regulatory notification obligation under state or federal breach disclosure rules.

Write the first external customer communication, to go out within the disclosure window, that states what happened, what data or funds were affected, what we've already done to contain it, and what the customer should do right now, without using vague hedging language like "we take security seriously" without backing it with specifics.

Write a separate message for our largest enterprise or partner accounts that requires a more detailed technical explanation and a direct offer of a call with our security team, since they need more than the mass customer email.

Write talking points for media or social media inquiries that acknowledge the incident without admitting unconfirmed liability, plus 3 answers to the hardest questions a reporter or regulator would ask.

End with a post-incident trust-rebuilding plan covering the next 30 days, and a post-mortem template with sections for timeline, root cause, customer impact, what we're changing structurally, and how we'll prove to customers and regulators it won't happen the same way twice.

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