Blog: Educational

Structuring is the federal crime of breaking up or arranging cash transactions to keep a bank from filing a currency transaction report. It is the offense the CTR rules created: once Congress required banks to report cash over $10,000, people with reasons to avoid that report started splitting deposits, spreading them across branches and days, and recruiting friends to make them. Congress responded by making the evasion itself illegal, regardless of where the money came from.

For ...

Most bankers know Regulation CC by its hold chart. Fewer have read the statute underneath it, and that gap shows up in the wrong places: in a policy that cites the regulation for something only the statute says, in a training session that treats a Board interpretation as if Congress wrote it, or in a compliance file that cannot explain why the dollar amounts changed on July 1, 2025.

The Expedited Funds Availability Act is short. It runs from 12 U.S.C. 4001 to 4010, ten sections in ...

A payable-on-death designation is about the simplest estate planning tool a customer can get, and that simplicity is why so many end up in dispute. The customer adds a name at the desk or on a screen, nobody thinks about it again for twenty years, and the bank gets the death certificate. Then the account records, state law and the deposit agreement have to answer who gets paid, how much and on what proof. Usually the employee answering that has never seen how the designation was set ...

Escheatment is the process by which property that its owner has stopped claiming is turned over to a state. For a bank, it is not an abstract legal concept. It is an annual operational cycle that touches deposit accounts, official checks, safe deposit boxes, loan credit balances and the bank's own uncashed vendor and payroll checks. Somebody in deposit operations or compliance has to find the property, try to reach the owner, file a report in each state that has a claim to it, and send the ...

Ask a new compliance analyst what "regulatory reporting" means and you will usually get one of two answers. Someone who came from finance says the Call Report. Someone who came from the BSA side says CTRs and SARs. Both are right, and both are describing a small part of the picture.

Bank regulatory reporting is the full set of recurring and event-driven filings a bank sends to government agencies about its condition, its lending, its customers' transactions and its tax-reportable ...

Few BSA topics have generated as much confusion over the last few years as "beneficial ownership." Part of the reason is that the phrase now describes two different obligations owned by two different parties. One is a bank obligation: the customer due diligence (CDD) rule requires banks to identify and verify the people who own and control their legal entity customers. The other was a company obligation: the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) required many businesses to file beneficial ...

The Securities Industry Essentials exam, almost always shortened to the SIE, is the front door to every FINRA representative registration. If you work in a bank and have ever thought about moving to the investment desk, the bank's brokerage affiliate, or a platform role selling funds and annuities, the SIE is the first exam you will meet. It is also the only one you can take entirely on your own.

That last point is what makes the SIE different from everything else in the securities ...