Cybersecurity and fraud are no longer separate conversations from the day-to-day of running a business; they’re financial risk, operational risk, and reputational risk rolled into one. That was the throughline of Beyond the Breach, a cybersecurity and fraud prevention forum hosted by Citizens Bank in partnership with Big Sur Technologies, where a panel of banking and IT leaders sat down to talk candidly about what’s actually happening to small and medium-sized businesses right now, and what owners can do about it.
Big Sur’s President and CEO, Sam Sandusky, joined Kerri Greener, VP and Business Banking Treasury Specialist at Citizens Bank, and Ben Altman, General Manager and Senior Director for Citizens Merchant Services, for a wide-ranging discussion that moved from wire fraud to artificial intelligence to the everyday habits that quietly leave businesses exposed. A few themes stood out.
Fraud has moved almost entirely online, but the exposure often starts somewhere ordinary. Panelists pointed to account takeover as the fastest-growing threat businesses face today – not a single fraudulent charge, but a compromised login that opens the door to stored payment methods, loyalty points, gift card balances, and redirected refunds all at once. The common thread behind nearly every case discussed was something deceptively simple: reused passwords, a familiar-looking email, or a phone call that sounded like it came from the bank. Sam shared a story about wiring $400,000 and personally double- and triple-checking every detail along the way, a reminder that even seasoned business owners feel the weight of how easily a routine transaction can go wrong.
The panel was direct about a fact many business owners haven’t fully absorbed: once a wire goes out, it isn’t coming back. The recovery window is measured in minutes, not days, and the days of a bank taking a customer’s word for fraud and issuing an automatic credit are largely over. That reality reframes email verification and payment controls as financial safeguards, not IT overhead – a point Sam reinforced by describing why Big Sur builds protections like managed firewalls, endpoint protection, and 24/7 threat monitoring directly into client packages rather than offering them as optional add-ons. Business owners don’t need to become cybersecurity experts, but they do need a provider that has already made those decisions on their behalf.
Artificial intelligence came up repeatedly, and the panel’s take was refreshingly balanced. Nobody on stage dismissed AI as a threat to be avoided; the tools are already woven into daily banking, fraud detection, and business operations. But Sam drew a distinction business owners should understand clearly: a contained tool like Microsoft Copilot works within a business’s own environment, while a public tool like ChatGPT sends information out to the open web the moment it’s used. He shared an example from a police department Big Sur supports, where officers were unknowingly using ChatGPT to rewrite reports, making sensitive information public in the process. As AI adoption accelerates heading into the back half of 2026, the panel’s message was consistent: businesses need clear AI usage policies and real data governance, not just enthusiasm for the technology.
Perhaps the most useful thread of the morning was the idea that fraud prevention is never one-size-fits-all. Ben Altman compared it to insurance: the right coverage changes based on the business, the customer base, and even life circumstances, the same way his own car insurance changed the moment his daughter started driving. The panel encouraged business owners to actually understand their own patterns, where payments come from, who their loyal customers are, where friction and chargebacks show up, rather than reaching for a generic solution and assuming it’s enough.
The overarching message from the forum was one Big Sur has built its entire approach around: business owners don’t have to be the experts. They need a banking partner and an IT partner working in step, translating complexity into a handful of decisions that are already made correctly. That collaborative model, where financial controls and technology controls reinforce each other, is exactly why events like Beyond the Breach matter, and exactly the kind of partnership Big Sur brings to every client relationship, backed by 25+ years as a steward of technology for businesses across Tampa Bay.
If your business hasn’t had a cybersecurity or fraud readiness conversation recently, there’s no better time to start one. Reach out to Big Sur Technologies to talk through where your business stands today.
