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 ...

When a customer who receives Social Security dies, the benefit deposits do not stop right away. The payment arriving the month after death has to go back, and often one or two more arrive before the agency's records catch up. By the time Treasury asks for the money, a surviving spouse or adult child may have spent it. The federal rule for who pays in that case is 31 CFR Part 210, Subpart B, and it puts the bank in the middle. A bank that knows the rules and answers a reclamation notice ...

An executor walks in with a folder of papers, a death certificate and a question: "How do I open an account for my mother's estate?" Handled well, this becomes a clean fiduciary relationship. The bank knows who has authority, the account carries the right taxpayer number, and every dollar in and out can be traced when the estate closes. Handled badly, it becomes an account opened under the decedent's Social Security number, a signer whose authority was never checked, and post-death federal ...

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 ...

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: ...

"Dormant" and "inactive" are used interchangeably at the branch, on statements and in core system menus, and that is where many escheatment errors begin. One word usually describes an internal status the bank chose for its own reasons. The other, when it is used precisely, describes a legal condition under a state's unclaimed property law that starts a reporting obligation. The two run on different clocks, are reset by different events, and lead to different consequences.

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Bank directors are usually chosen for what they know about something other than banking. A community bank board might include a business owner, a lawyer, an accountant, a physician and a retired executive, each bringing judgment and local knowledge. What none of them brought on day one was an understanding of what a bank board is legally required to do, which decisions only the board can make, and which of their own transactions with the bank are restricted by federal ...