Blog: Teller Training

Most community banks offer investment and insurance products through a third-party broker-dealer. The representatives may be employees of that firm, or dual employees, and the trades, the supervision, and the securities licensing all run through an organization the bank does not control.

Which produces the central problem in this area: the bank is not the broker-dealer, and the bank owns the customer relationship, the premises, the name on the door, and a specific set of

The teller role is described in job postings as customer service with cash handling. That description is missing the part that matters: a teller is a compliance control, a fraud detection point, and frequently the only bank employee a customer ever speaks to.

This guide covers what the role actually requires, in the order a new teller learns it.

Cash Handling

Balancing. The drawer is counted at the start and end of every shift and must reconcile to

"Know your customer" is one of those phrases that everyone in banking uses and few can define precisely. It is not a single regulation. It is a stack of three related obligations — identification, due diligence, and ongoing monitoring — that operate on different timelines and fail in different ways.

This guide separates them, then covers the practices that distinguish programs that survive examination from those that do not.

The Three Layers

Layer 1: Customer

The Bank Secrecy Act is the oldest and broadest compliance obligation most bankers will ever work under, and it is also the one most often explained badly. New compliance staff are handed a list of forms and thresholds — file a CTR over $10,000, file a SAR when something looks wrong — without ever being shown how the pieces connect or why the statute is built the way it is.

This guide fixes that. It walks through what the BSA actually requires, how five decades of amendments layered ...