INCH360 2025: Tara Chandler
Welcome to the Cyber Trapps Podcast.
I am your host, Jethro Jones, and I'm here with Tara Chandler.
Today we are at the Inch 360 cybersecurity conference, and Tara works as the Treasury Management Officer for ICCU.
And Tara, do you mind just telling us a little bit about what that is first?
certainly treasury management officer.
I work with business entities nonprofits, also municipalities and public education entities with their deposit relationship.
So I help them with account structure.
And kind of all the products and services that we offer as a financial institution to help them pull funds in, push funds out.
And then what is so important now, and a lot of what we're talking about here today is fraud prevention.
And so that is, I imagine that would take up a large part of your work in making sure that fraud doesn't happen.
I mean, I get phone calls all the time saying your credit card or your debit card was used for this purchase.
Do you authorize that?
Is that part of what you do?
It is.
A lot of it is preemptively educating the business members on the exist or the risk that exists.
And there's a product called Positive Pay for a CH and checks where.
You, it's kind of like a, security fence I like to say.
Where you only allow through a CH debits that you allow.
Or the checks can only clear you upload a CSV file or whatever of checks that have been issued, and you upload the check number the dollar amount, and who you've been, you issued it to.
It will only allow through that item if it matches all those data points and it will only allow it through one time.
So they to represent it or they add another zero all of these items, so it gives that it really is insurance 'cause you want to stop it occurring before it does instead of trying to clean it up after the fact.
Yeah, for sure.
Cleaning it up after the fact is a nightmare.
Yeah.
And and very, very frustrating.
I accidentally deposited a check twice not understanding that I had already deposited it once and, and then thankfully that was the bank was just like, oh, this is rejected, You don't get it.
And I don't know what they were using to manage that or anything, but it was good because I was like, wait, did I already deposit this?
And thankfully the other, the company that paid me didn't get debited and I didn't have to do a, reverse draft or whatever for anything.
So they just said, no deal.
And I was grateful for that.
'cause it was an honest mistake that I just, I thought I had not deposited it yet, but I did so.
Right.
Well, and something, I mean that you can adjust that and you can work through that as a but what I really educate businesses on is that CH risk where let's say you write.
Checks or you're a larger business and you have vendors that want to debit your account.
So your account number's out there and that's a risk 'cause you don't know who's on the other end.
has access to your account number.
Well, let's say something happens your account number gets in somebody's hands.
Well, somebody can.
Somewhere out there, create an account at an institution and, as a individual when you wanna do an a CH debit from an external account, you can, you'll see those little pings of testing if the account
uhhuh,
you know, of a 3 cents, 4 cents, 5 cents, that will occur to a business member's account if it's not protected.
Once it validates that account is open and active.
this occurs, we've seen it, and it happens so quickly.
They will do a debit, a CH debit of 50,000 a hundred over 101.
And if there's no filter, if there's no block, goes.
Once it's gone, it hits that account.
The other financial institution, it's transferred out.
And if commonly, once it's gone.
And that can crush, that can that business depending on the size.
So that's, those are the big ones we never wanna see happen.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is tragic.
So one of the things that I also wanna talk to you that you have this remarkable tablet in front of you, and you taking notes on it as we were in the main hall there, and I've never seen one this small.
And so tell me about why you like it and how you're using it.
So this one's a little smaller than the larger one you'll see out.
And
you're holding this in your palm.
And so it is one handed and you looks like comfortably holding it.
It's little bit wider than a typical phone, but not too much.
And like smaller than a Kindle or thinner than a Kindle for those who use those.
Correct.
And so you can still write multiple pages, but from my perspective I wanna be able to toss it in my purse as I go from meeting to meeting.
I suppose if you're a man, maybe you could put it in your back That's my thought process going from meeting to meeting.
I want it really mobile capable, but still has all the ability.
Yeah.
So one of the things that makes this a little bit better than having a laptop and typing away on it is that whenever you open up a laptop in an in-person meeting, then puts up a barrier physically and sometimes emotionally and everything also.
So there's, and you can't see what the other person is doing.
This, you're holding a pen and you're writing on it.
Have, is that part of why you prefer this instead of taking notes on a laptop, for example?
A hundred percent.
It's very lightweight the surface area is open and visible, and I'm writing as if I'm writing notes.
And if you're typing, you can mis key and then you have to delete and try to go back and track it with your eyes on the screen.
Where this, you can just write out or, shorthand as you normally would.
Taking notes, but there's the ability to take your notes and change it into a print, type, and then you can file it and create a file for perhaps that
member meeting and then email it to yourself so it cleans it all up and it neat and tidy instead of notebook after notebook and paper flipping and all that
Yeah.
Well, I've taken notes in a notebook for a long time, but I've also.
Just done it in plain text notes a long time and that's been really helpful.
So, Tara, thank you for being here.
Thanks for your time.
Thanks for coming to the Inch 360 conference.
And definitely folks go visit icc.com and support one of these great businesses here locally.
Thanks so much.
Appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.