Business email compromise (BEC)
What is business email compromise, and why does it matter to a lender?
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BY MICHAEL SHANG · SIXTEEN YEARS IN COMMERCIAL BANKING · UPDATED
// THE SHORT ANSWER
Business email compromise is a fraud in which a criminal takes over or imitates a supplier's or executive's email and asks for a payment to be sent, or a supplier's bank details changed, to an account the criminal controls. Because the victim authorises the payment, it is usually hard to reverse, and scam-reimbursement rules, where they exist, often cover only individuals and the smallest businesses. Banks and auditors treat a call-back check on any change of payee details as a basic control, and a lender reads a large unrecovered loss as a hit to working capital like any other.
BASIS Practitioner judgment from sixteen years in commercial banking, set out in How Bankers Think (Highbank Press, 2026). Every borrower on this site is a composite constructed for teaching, not a client. The market is mid-market commercial lending as practised in New Zealand and Australia; where a convention differs elsewhere, the page says so.
// WORKED IN
// NEXT TO IT
- Maturity transformation
- Risk-weighted assets
- Net interest margin
- Credit cycle
- Yield curve
- Cost of risk
- Management overlay (provisions)
- Notional pooling
- Zero-balancing (cash concentration)
- Confirmation of Payee (CoP)
- Credit conversion factor (CCF)
- Four-eyes principle (maker-checker)
- Behavioural maturity
- Deposit beta
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