United Bank and Trust Secures Network, Data and Reputation with the Ring of a Phone

The Business Challenge:

United Bank and Trust, a locally-owned community bank in Tecumseh, MI, offers a variety of services, including personal banking, business banking, and wealth management. In this climate of rampant fraud and identity theft, they wanted extra assurance their information and that of their customers was safe.

United Bank and Trust needed a fast, affordable, and user-friendly solution to enable its employees to securely access the bank’s sensitive data. They couldn’t settle for anything less than an ultra secure solution that required no employee training or taxing of IT resources.

The Solution:

During its careful evaluation of various solutions, United Bank and Trust decided to try a free version of PhoneFactor, a phone-based, two-factor authentication technology. The employee simply receives a call when logging in. They answer and press # to complete their login. If the employee wasn’t in the process of logging on, they knew it was an intruder and could deny access on the spot. The free trial quickly proved to be the answer United Bank and Trust was looking for: a secure, easy, and affordable way to protect their network from intruders.

“PhoneFactor helps United Bank and Trust securely protect our network, our data, and our reputation,” said Arell Chapman, AVP Network Administrator for United Bank and Trust.

“With United Bank and Trust being so tightly regulated, it was extremely important that we meet all of our requirements,” said Chapman. “PhoneFactor ensures that we maintain those regulations at all times.”

Regulation of the banking industry has never been more stringent. United Bank and Trust is regulated by GLBA, FDIC, Sarbanes-Oxley, FFIEC, as well as by the state of Michigan. PhoneFactor helps to meet each of the agencies requirements for secure network access.

PhoneFactor’s unique out-of-band authentication and live fraud alerts offer a significantly higher level of security than other methods – helping meet and exceed current regulatory requirements. Because PhoneFactor relies exclusively on the telephone network for the second factor of authentication, even if a user’s computer or network connection is compromised the authentication call is still secure. United Bank and Trust elected to require their employees to enter a PIN number instead of just pressing # to authenticate, adding yet another layer of security, and enabled support for PhoneFactor’s real-time fraud reporting capabilities.

PhoneFactor has also been able to assist United Bank and Trust in its overall business success by providing secure work-at-home access to its employees, which has been well received by the employees. In fact, since the successful test run, the bank has opted to utilize PhoneFactor for various networks.

Best of all, it took only a few minutes to set up the Web-based PhoneFactor, and installation did not require any training, or changes to either the user interface or the phone. Employee adoption is a key factor many competing security systems fail to deliver. One of the advantages of PhoneFactor is the way employees feel about using it — they like it. One of Chapman’s major concerns when researching security systems was that when any new technology is cumbersome, getting in the way of performing a job, employees tend to obviate it after a while, even if their intentions are good.

“We looked at tokens, but our employees weren’t thrilled with the need to carry another piece of hardware around with them,” Chapman said. “We looked at software, but wanted to avoid taxing our IT staff with lost or rolling passwords. PhoneFactor is a great fit; it becomes part of our workflow, instead of disrupting it.”