As a business owner, your priorities likely center on reaching your growth goals, delivering products or services effectively to customers, and providing a positive work environment for your team. Worrying about the security of your business bank account or fraudulent activities that affect your company takes time and energy away from daily operations. That's why community banks in Ohio, like Consumers National Bank, invest in solutions that protect your business bank accounts.

Our business lenders have gathered answers to frequently asked questions about account security and fraud protection. If you have a question that we haven’t addressed, connect with the Consumers National Bank team and let us know and we can add them to the list.

1. A recent report from the AFP (Association of Financial Professionals) reported that 66 percent of attempted payment fraud involved checks. What steps can we take to reduce the risk of check fraud? Choose a bank like Consumers National Bank that offers Positive Pay technology. With Positive pay, your bank team completes a verification process that compares checks presented for payment to those you’ve actually issued. Payments don't occur on exceptions without your approval.
2. Our company fought off a cyberattack last year, but the temporary shutdown of the bank account that accepted orders cost us several thousand dollars. How can we protect access to our business bank account? IBM’s 2021 Cost of a Data Breach report revealed that lost business accounted for almost 40 percent of breach costs. Unfortunately, compromised employee credentials opened the door to hackers in 20 percent of attacks. One solution that banks across the nation now offer to protect business bank accounts is multi-factor authentication. Your employees must present 2 forms of authorization credentials when accessing your account. After entering a username and password, your team will receive another one-time credential received over a mobile phone before the login is complete.
3. Our bank received a fraudulent request by phone for a wire transfer payment to one of our vendors. What can we do to prevent this type of attack? When you partner with a bank focused on personalized service like Consumers National Bank, you'll benefit from our vigilance with customer account management. Our policies prohibit the bank from making wire transfers based on an incoming phone call, and we confirm all email requests via a phone call to the number we have on file before authorizing funds to leave your business bank account.
4. In the event of fraudulent activity or a data breach, what can we do to retain access to funds in our account? Community banks like Consumers National Bank implement rigorous security measures to safeguard your privacy and money. We'll work with you to further optimize your business bank accounts protection. For example, we may recommend that you open a payroll account and an account for managing operating expenses. Keeping separate accounts ensures that you’ll have money available if one of the accounts is temporarily affected by suspicious activity.
5. We had a higher-than-usual inventory transaction processed that our bank should have flagged. How can we prevent future losses due to fraud? In addition to implementing internal reviews of expenses and purchases, ask your bank about their transaction review process. Consumers National Bank not only trains team members to become familiar with customers’ patterns so that unusual transactions stand out, but we have specialized software that looks for “out of the ordinary” activity to help keep fraud to a minimum. We’ll call to verify the authenticity of an unusual expense before completing any financial transaction.

To learn more about business bank accounts at Consumers National Bank and how we can support your growth goals, connect with our team today!