The greatest loss to the financial services industry is the loss of senior management, according to disaster recovery experts. As one consultant said: 'You can do so much in the recovery of data, but New York will lose out as a financial centre because the deals and expertise have been lost with the staff.'

As the dust settles on the human tragedy in New York, it is extremely likely that all information of deals that took place on the day before the attack on the World Trade Center will have been lost for ever. While all banks would have carried out a back-up over the weekend, the tapes of the back-ups carried out the night before the disaster would not have been collected or removed from the building until later that morning.