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Oswego County National Bank Gets Up To Speed With Voltage SecureMail

March 2008 by Marc Jacob

Like many regional banks today, Oswego County National Bank (OCNB) has to compete not only with other institutions of its own size, but with the local branches of giant national banks also. When the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) came into effect in March 2000, it became easier for large banking firms, or financial holding companies, to expand their operations into new markets. At the same time, however, GLBA imposed new rules that required banks to regularly alert customers to their policies for managing personal financial data. With awareness of security issues rising among the banking public, innovative banking firms saw an opportunity to differentiate themselves from the competition and gain an edge in an increasingly challenging marketplace. For OCNB, one way of doing so was by implementing end-to-end secure email messaging with Voltage SecureMail.

“GLBA and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) had an effect on a lot of our customers, especially our business clients,” said Joe McManus, senior network technician at OCNB. Situated in the Lake Ontario city of Oswego, approximately 40 miles north of Syracuse, New York, OCNB maintains seven branches in the area and employs more than 90 people. “As the banking landscape changed in the early 2000s, our information technology department saw an opportunity to provide a higher level of service, while still meeting regulatory requirements, and drove this whole secure email initiative.”

The particular challenge facing OCNB was in transmitting sensitive financial information to clients and business partners as they negotiated and secured financing for commercial real estate. With all the back and forth between attorneys, principals, the bank and other stakeholders during loan processing, transactions could get delayed as documents made their way back and forth. “We had used overnight courier services for many years to send contracts, mortgage forms and other documents,” said McManus. “It was apparent that we could do away with a lot of paper and the expense of overnight delivery if we could find a way to use email instead. But in light of the privacy and legal considerations raised by GLBA and SOX, getting everyone onboard was not easy.”

Finding The Right Solution For The Job

Initially, OCNB’s commercial and legal departments drafted a waiver that proposed allowing loan officers to send confidential information to clients and partners over non-secure email. “Our CIO would not approve the waiver, however, because confidential information must be sent securely,” said McManus. Searching for an alternative, McManus and his team tested a few different encryption products with an eye toward making a recommendation to the OCNB technology steering committee. An ad hoc group of executives and staff members, the committee has to sign-off on any big purchases of software or hardware.

It didn’t take long for OCNB to find a solution for their secure email needs. “We opted to go with Voltage SecureMail and the Voltage SecureMail Gateway Server, and the committee agreed,” said McManus. Why Voltage? “Effectiveness, ease of use and price were the primary criteria,” said McManus. “With Voltage, our people just have to type a pre-determined keyword in the subject of their email and the gateway takes care of the rest.”

A native capability of the Voltage SecureMail Gateway, this kind of keyword-triggered automated encryption dramatically simplifies day-to-day use for OCNB staff. In addition, the server, which is installed at the network edge, provides gateway-based capabilities that allow OCNB staff to automatically encrypt their email and attached documents whenever sensitive communications are being sent out. The result is that the bank’s work product—and not just its cover email text—is safely encrypted in transit, providing a far higher level of security than paper-based courier services can provide. “With Voltage, rather than having to overnight our loan documents, people can simply send them through secure email, “ said McManus. “ It’s faster, cheaper and keeps the people we work with happier.”

OCNB also opted to provide the Voltage SecureMail desktop client software to users outside the company, such as board members, business partners and customers who are in frequent contact with the bank. Again, ease of use was the primary concern. While Voltage Zero Download Messenger does allow recipients of encrypted email to receive and reply without the need to download any software, regardless of system environment, installing the client software on both ends more closely integrated the bank’s clients and partners into the new system.

Even though McManus and his team arranged for 100 seats of SecureMail, he maintains that training was easy. “By allowing our board members and business partners outside the network to install the SecureMail client, we got everyone up and running right away,” explained McManus. “Also, these outside users didn’t have to go through the process of learning how to use Zero Download Manager—which saved even more time.” Voltage has been largely pain-free from the IT management standpoint, as well. “The implementation went great,” said McManus. “The gateway engineer from Voltage answered all our questions, even before we got the sever onsite. Even better, Voltage SecureMail hasn’t really added to our workload since it was in put in place.”


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