We have several business customers signed up for our Business Online product where they would like to include more than one business entity under the same sign-on. The business entities may or may not have identical ownership. We haven't allowed this to date, but it is becoming a common request. Is anyone allowing this? If so, do you have an agreement that is signed to authorize this type of set-up. Obviously, we are concerned about different ownership among the entities and our ability to obtain authorization and limit the liability to the bank if there is unauthorized activity taking place between the accounts of the different business entities.

I could not imagine the bank authorizing/allowing account access to a non-owner/signer. If I as a customer wanted someone to otherwise be able to access my account, I'd share my logon information with them, possibly violating all security protocols known. If there is theft later, who will be left holding the bag?

We have not allowed it, nor do I expect would we ever plan to. We can't know with any certainty that account owners/signers are always the same between the two businesses, and we wouldn't want to allow the ability to transfer moneys between different legal entities through the online channel.

Our online access is based entirley on signage on the account. If a business customer signs up for our eBusiness product, he/she will see all accounts he/she is a signer on, regardless if they are different business/entity accounts. From there, as the adminstrator of the account, he/she can create additional users and specify which accounts they have access to, limits on bill pay, their abiltiy to transfer money, etc. The owner of the account(s) (or their designee) are trained by our Business Sales/commercial lending staff and have signed agreements they must sign acknowledging their accountability. Andy, does this seem reasonable or should we be looking at this again?