Tong Family

Well we use Silicon Valley Bank for most of our company banking. It’s a habit because they’ve been so good to us over the years. But, their business account system is pretty hard to navigate. The user interface is deep and there are menus after menus, so here are some notes on some common things that you might want to do:

1. Turn on two administrator authentication. This is pretty important and basic security, but make sure it is on and running. What this means is that even things like changing your name and address require approvals from other administrators.
2. Changing your email or phone number. Well, it turns out that for security reasons you can’t just change these things in the user interface. Another administrator has to do it and then yet a third administrator has to approve it. So this is nothing like personal banking and that’s actually a good thing. It takes way more to hack into these business systems.
3. Adding Credit Card Management. OK, I spent literally months trying to figure this out, but it turns out that, when you go to User Administration and then choose Edit, it looks like you can only see your business accounts and not the credit cards, you basically have to click through a bunch of questions and approvals and at the end, you will see the Credit Card Management screen. Not super obvious what is going on here and there is no mention about this when you pick edit.
4. And it is great that when you make changes like this it locks out the user you’ve changed and another administrator has to approve it. Kudos SVB for the security.