Every bank has an institution-level BSA/AML risk assessment: the document that looks across products, services, customers and geographies and concludes where the bank's money laundering and terrorist financing exposure sits. That document gets a lot of attention. The customer-level risk rating gets less, even though it is the mechanism that actually decides how much diligence and monitoring each relationship receives.

This post is about the customer-level model: what goes into a ...

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 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 ...

The cost of getting securities licensed is easy to underestimate. Candidates look up the Series 7 fee, budget for it, and then discover that the Series 7 is one of three exams they need, that a late reschedule costs money, and that a failed attempt means paying the full fee again.

This guide puts the current exam fees for the SIE, Series 6, Series 7, Series 63, Series 65 and Series 66 in one table, adds up what the common license paths cost, explains who usually pays in a bank or ...

The Series 7 is long, and its questions are built around what a general securities representative actually does: finding customers, opening accounts, making recommendations and processing transactions. Practice questions are the best way to get used to that format, but the explanations are where the learning happens. A practice question you get right by luck teaches nothing; one you get wrong and then fully understand is worth a dozen you skim past.

This page gives you twenty ...

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 ...

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 ...