Blog: Buyer's Guide

Most suspicious activity reports start at a teller window, a new-accounts desk or a loan officer's office, not in the BSA department. Most CTR errors start in the same places. The BSA officer can design a flawless program, but if the person taking a $9,800 cash deposit for the third day running does not recognize the pattern, or the person completing the CTR records the conductor as the account owner, the program fails at the first step.

That is why transaction-reporting training for ...

Most banks have no formal training on what happens to an account when the customer dies. New account staff learn ownership designations from the person who trained them. Deposit operations learns estate procedures one case at a time. The trust department knows probate well but rarely sees the branch side. When something goes wrong, it is usually at the handoffs between these groups: a POD beneficiary paid too early, an estate account opened under the decedent's Social Security number, a ...

Most branch managers are promoted, not hired. The best teller, personal banker or assistant manager in the branch gets the job, and on the first day discovers that the skills that earned the promotion cover maybe a third of the new role. The rest, which includes supervising compliance decisions, running branch operations to audit standard, managing people and owning a growth target, is learned on the job, often by making the mistakes first.

Bank branch manager training exists to ...

HMDA errors are rarely made in February. They are made in May, at a kitchen table, when a loan officer takes an application by phone and skips the demographic questions. They are made in July, when a processor keys a property address that will never geocode. They are made in October, when an underwriter's denial reason does not match what went into the file. By the time the HMDA coordinator runs the edits in January, the data has been wrong for months, and fixing it means pulling files one ...

The FINRA exams get most of the attention, but for a bank investment representative the state law exam is often the one that actually holds up the start date. The Series 63, 65 and 66 are written by the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA), administered by FINRA, and tested on different material from the SIE and the top-off exams. Candidates who pass the Series 7 comfortably and then treat the state exam as an afterthought are the ones who end up waiting 30 days to ...

The Securities Industry Essentials exam is the one securities exam a bank employee can take on their own initiative. No firm has to sponsor you, nobody has to file a Form U4, and a pass stays on the books for four years. That makes the SIE the natural first step for a teller, personal banker or operations analyst who wants to move into the bank's investment program, and it means the prep decision is usually yours to make and often yours to pay for.

There is no shortage of SIE exam ...