IT support for El Paso credit unions, community banks and financial firms
TechBit Solutions supports El Paso credit unions, community banks, insurance agencies and accounting firms with the access controls, documentation and staff training an examiner will ask to see.
What financial institutions call us about
TechBit Solutions supports credit unions, community banks, insurance agencies, accounting firms and independent financial advisors in the El Paso area.
The calls are usually about an examination that is coming, a policy document that needs to exist, a member or client asking how their data is protected, or a wire request that looked wrong.
What we support
- Branch networks and the connections between locations
- Teller and member service workstations, which cannot be down during opening hours
- Email, including the encryption expected when account information is sent
- Access control, so people reach the systems their role requires and no more
- Logging and retention, because the question of who did what needs an answer
- Backup and recovery tested against a target you have agreed
- Vendor and third-party review of the systems you buy from others
- Staff security training, delivered in English or Spanish
Examinations and written policy
Financial institutions are examined, and examiners ask for documents. A control that exists but is not written down is difficult to evidence and easy to lose an argument about.
We keep the technical documentation current as part of the ongoing work rather than producing it in a panic. That includes an inventory of systems, a record of who has access to what, evidence that backups are tested, patching records, and an incident response plan with names against the roles.
Our compliance support page describes the frameworks we work against.
Vendor management and due diligence
A financial institution is responsible for its vendors, and that includes us.
We provide the documentation you need to hold in your file about TechBit Solutions, and we help you ask the same questions of your other technology suppliers. The question that catches most institutions out is a simple one: which of your vendors can reach member data, and what have they told you in writing about how they protect it?
Fraud, wire requests and staff training
The realistic threat to a small financial institution is not a sophisticated intrusion. It is a convincing email asking somebody to move money, or a member's account taken over with a password that was reused somewhere else.
- Multi-factor authentication everywhere, including on accounts that seem unimportant
- Mail filtering, plus alerting on the forwarding rules attackers add after taking a mailbox
- Verification steps for payment instructions that do not depend on email or a phone number supplied in the request
- Regular staff training with realistic examples, because the person who spots it is usually the last line
- Alerting on unusual sign-ins, so a compromised account is caught in hours
Availability during opening hours
A branch that cannot serve members is closed, whatever the sign on the door says.
TechBit Solutions answers in minutes from 5am to 8pm Mountain, which covers opening preparation and end-of-day work rather than just the middle of the day. The after-hours line at (915) 253-9757 reaches a person.
Getting started
We start with an access and documentation review. See also security assessment and business continuity.
Call TechBit Solutions at (915) 629-8888.
Questions we get asked
Do you work with our core banking provider?
We work alongside them. The core provider owns the core. We own everything around it: the network it runs on, the workstations tellers use, the email, and the security controls an examiner will ask about.
Can you produce evidence for an examination?
Yes. We keep the documentation and reporting in a form that can be handed over, rather than reconstructing it the month before an examination.
Are you an auditor?
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. We implement and document controls, and we prepare you for the audit. The audit itself needs to come from somebody independent, which is also what your examiner will expect.
What about wire fraud?
It is the loss that actually happens, far more often than a technical breach. Most of the defense is process rather than software: verification steps that do not rely on email, and staff who have been trained on what a convincing request looks like.
We are a small credit union. Is this affordable?
The controls scale down. What does not scale down is the expectation, because the rules do not have a small-institution exemption for most of this. We will tell you what is required and what is optional. Institutions of your size across El Paso run exactly this, and we scope the work to what you actually hold rather than to a template built for a bank ten times your size.