What I’m Learning Part 2: Navigating a Banking Outage
Practical Payroll Solutions and Why I.T. Needs to Ditch Negative Rhetoric
By Laura Baker, Executive Director, CyberWyoming
If your business relies on Hilltop Bank, the past several days have likely been a blur of stress and triage. When you’re scrambling to make sure your employees get paid and your operations stay afloat, you don’t need a lecture on technology. You need practical, immediate solutions.
Here is what business owners are doing on the ground to navigate payroll right now, how to set up true financial redundancy for the future, and why we as a business community need to change how we talk about cybersecurity.
1. Navigating Immediate Payroll: What Businesses Are Doing Right Now
If your primary banking funds are currently locked up due to the outage, here are the three primary paths small businesses are taking to meet payroll:
- Branch Support & Paper Checks: Even with digital systems offline, Hilltop Bank is honoring paper checks for payroll. For instance, when the town of Bar Nunn faced a payroll deadline during the shutdown, town officials worked directly with Hilltop personnel, who confirmed they would honor paper checks cut for employees. Hilltop has opened five key branches (Main Office, Downtown Office, MotorBank, Glenrock Office, and Cheyenne Downtown Office) to cash Hilltop-originated checks, accept deposits, and assist customers with unique payroll needs. (Bank leadership has also confirmed they will reimburse customers for any late fees incurred due to the outage.)
- Short-Term Payroll Bridge Loans: Owners are reaching out to secondary financial institutions for short-term payroll loans. We are encouraging regional banks and credit unions to offer zero-interest payroll bridge loans—similar to the relief offered to federal workers during government shutdowns—so no business has to face a third-party liquidity crisis alone.
- Utilizing Business Owner Personal Funds: If you are using personal funds to bridge payroll, do not pay business expenses directly from your personal account. First, open an account at a non-affected bank, transfer your personal funds into that business account, and run payroll from the business entity level to maintain clean accounting and legal protections.
2. Your Future Redundancy: 2 Rules for a Backup Account
The most important lesson for every small business is simple: never put all your operational eggs in one financial basket.
Once this immediate crisis is behind us, the single most important change to make in your Incident Response (IR) Playbook is establishing a backup bank account. Setting up a secondary account costs zero dollars—most banks offer no-fee, zero-minimum business checking or savings options.
Opening an interest-bearing business savings account at a second bank and keeping one month’s worth of operating and payroll expenses there ensures you can shift funds quickly if your primary bank goes dark.
When choosing your secondary financial institution, ensure it satisfies two critical criteria:
- Geographic Diversity: Pick a bank located in a different region or corner of the state or region so a localized power grid failure or infrastructure disruption won’t take out both banks at once.
- Core Software Diversity: Make sure your backup bank uses a different core banking software platform (such as Jack Henry, Fiserv, or Alkami) than your primary bank. If a core software vulnerability or outage impacts one platform, your secondary bank remains fully operational.
Your Step-by-Step Recovery Playbook:
If your primary bank ever experiences an outage in the future:
- Call your backup bank to transfer funds from your savings reserve into an active checking account.
- Ask the backup bank to print a stack of temporary, blank counter checks on the spot.
- Run payroll through your normal process, but select paper checks instead of ACH—or update your payroll system’s routing info to draw direct deposits from your backup account.
- If you have a payroll company, then all you will need to do is ensure that the ACH withdrawal account changes to your backup bank.
3. Tech Industry - Ditch "It’s Not a Matter of If, But When"
Right now, so many business owners are in full triage mode. They are working around the clock to keep their doors open, support their workers, and protect their livelihood.
One of the reasons many owners hesitate to reach out during a crisis is that they dread hearing consultants hit them with an “I told you so.”
Across the tech and cybersecurity industry, people constantly repeat clichés like “It’s not a matter of if, but when a cyber attack occurs and puts you out of business.” This kind of negative, fatalistic framing is genuinely unhelpful. It erodes trust, strains relationships, and leaves business owners feeling isolated or defensive when they need support the most. We talk about this with our CyberWyoming members and in our Registered Apprenticeship program. I can assure you that if you need to reach out to one of our members for help, they will treat your relationship with care. https://cyberwyoming.org/members-sponsors/
Nobody deserves to be lectured during a crisis. Wyoming business owners are resilient, creative, and tough, but navigating third-party cyber disruptions requires community, empathy, and practical teamwork—not finger-wagging.
Let’s support each other through the recovery, learn the practical lessons together, and build real redundancy for the future.
