Client Success Stories

Securing the Online Channel for United Bank's Customers

By Joan Klinakis, Senior Vice President - Operations

Even with the slow economy, we have seen plenty of organic growth at United Bank. We have attracted new accounts with targeted products such as ‘Free for Life Checking’ and ‘Free and Easy Business Checking,’ and have succeeded in growing our account base by 39% since 2005.

The online channel is extremely important to our checking customers, and security tops everyone’s priorities. Frequent reports of cybercrime appearing in the press have undermined the public’s confidence that it can protect itself online. This is certainly a challenge, but we see this as an opportunity as well for United Bank.

We are working to protect our clients with all the tools at our disposal – technology, procedures, and partnership – and we continue to pursue new tools as the threat evolves. Our goal is always to preserve and enhance our customers’ trust.

On both sides of the cybercrime conflict, technology is changing constantly. Criminals exploit software flaws in common products, such as Adobe Acrobat® and Microsoft Word®. Banks patch their software to stop the criminals. Then the criminals develop methods to elude the patches. It’s an endless cycle.

Technology partners such as COCC have helped us stay ahead of the cybercrime spree by securing our email, encrypting our files, and auditing our Internet traffic. Still, new online banking technologies introduce new risks which we are addressing with more sophisticated technology, such as Go ID tokens, Trusteer Rapport system monitoring, and activity alerts. These technologies will enable us to verify who is transacting business with United Bank and help us prevent cyber thieves from diverting web traffic for their own gain.

Internal and external procedures also help protect our customers and our bank. Using best practices from our technology partners, we keep a close eye on unusual activity, especially status changes and wire payments. At our business customers’ sites, we spend time reviewing their policies and procedures. We strongly recommend dual controls to limit the risk, and ask our customers to set up a detailed approval process for everything they do. For consumers, we emphasize the importance of checking balances and activity on a regular basis and telling us about anything unusual. Through our email newsletter, we provide customers timely security tips regarding cyber fraud. Online and mobile banking tools are great for providing this information in a useful format.

Partnership is critical in combating the threat of cybercrime. Rather than sit back and expect the bank to assume the full burden of our customers’ security, we ask our customers to partner with us in taking responsibility for security. We have a much higher probability of success working together.