Blog: How To

Every currency transaction report and suspicious activity report a bank files ends up in the same place: FinCEN's BSA E-Filing System. The forms get most of the training attention, but the filing system is where a surprising number of real compliance failures happen. A SAR that was saved but never submitted, a batch file rejected for a schema error that nobody noticed, an acknowledgment that never arrived because the filer had no Secure Messenger access, a corrected CTR filed as a new report ...

Every bank that offers checking accounts publishes a funds availability policy, and most customers only read it after a hold has already annoyed them. For the bank, the disclosure carries more weight than its length suggests. It is the document that tells examiners what the bank promised, the yardstick every hold is measured against, and the first thing a plaintiff's lawyer will compare to the core system's actual behavior.

This guide is written for the people who draft, maintain and ...

Drilling a safe deposit box is one of the few routine bank operations that destroys property and exposes sealed contents in the customer's absence. Everything about the process is designed around one question that may be asked years later: can the bank prove what was in the box, that it had the right to open it, and that every item went where the law required?

Safe deposit box laws are almost entirely state law. There is no federal statute that tells a bank when it may drill a box or ...

The due diligence letter is the last step between a dormant account and the state. It is the bank's final attempt to reach the owner before reporting, and it does two jobs at once. It gives the customer a chance to keep the account, and it creates the evidence the bank needs if a state auditor or a returning customer later asks whether the bank tried.

Most states require some form of owner notice before a holder reports unclaimed property, but they differ on almost every parameter: ...

Every state-licensed mortgage loan originator in the United States starts in the same place: 20 hours of pre-licensing education approved by the Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System and Registry. It is the first step toward an MLO license, it is required by federal law, and it is the part of the process people most often get wrong, by taking a course that does not match their state, by letting it expire, or by assuming they need it when they do not.

This guide explains what the ...

Every fall, a stack of IRS correspondence lands in deposit operations that nobody is quite sure who owns. It is a CP2100 or CP2100A notice: a list of accounts where the name and taxpayer identification number the bank reported on a Form 1099 did not match IRS records. That notice starts a sequence with fixed business-day deadlines, two different customer letters, a second-notice validation rule that most frontline staff have never heard of, and, if the customer does not respond, backup ...

The Series 7 is the license most people mean when they talk about becoming a stockbroker or financial advisor. It qualifies a person as a General Securities Representative, which covers the broad range of securities a full-service representative handles: stocks, bonds, options, municipal securities and packaged products.

Getting it is less a single exam than a sequence of steps, and the sequence trips people up because one of the steps depends on someone else. You cannot simply sign ...