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CONTENTS
PREFACE: YOUR INVESTMENT IN THE FUTURE
INTRODUCTION: “BANKABILITY” STILL
PART ONE “Bankability” Basics—The Teller as a Person
1 What Is a Teller?
2 The Elements of Job Success
3 Personal Pointers
4 Getting Along with Your Co-Workers
5 Effective Communications—The Key to Motivating Others
6 How to Get Ahead
7 After Working Hours
PART TWO Build Your “Bankability”—Teller Operations
8 The Mathematics of Banking
9 The Bookkeeping of Banking
10 Knowing and Handling Money
11 How to Settle
12 Develop Efficient Work Habits
13 Opening New Accounts
14 How to Be Audited Painlessly
PART THREE “Bankability” Involves Security
15 Safeguarding Your Cash
16 Cashing Checks
17 This Is a Holdup!
18 Forged, Counterfeit, and Altered Checks
19 Counterfeit Currency
20 Defalcations
21 Cons and Frauds
22 Security and Customer Courtesy
23 Handling Emergencies
PART FOUR “Bankability” Means Dealing With Customers
Effectively
24 Know Your Services
25 Customers Are Important
26 Dealing with Difficult Situations
27 Financial Tips for Customers
PART FIVE “BANKABILITY” PLUS!—THE TELLER AS A SELLER
28 Selling Is Part of Your Job
29 Cross-Selling
30 Your Sales Talk
GLOSSARY
INDEX
Your Investment in the Future
PREFACE:
Many people think of “investments” strictly as the act of putting away
cash in some form for future use. Smart investors, however, don’t just put
money into some venture or form of savings and forget it. To the contrary,
they watch their investments carefully and try to help them grow.
In a very real sense, your career is an investment of your most
important asset—your time. When you chose a career as a teller, you
made a wise selection of an industry in which to invest that time because
it provides many opportunities for education and advancement. What’s
more, you can take pride in being a teller because your financial
institution is important to your community and you are important to it.
But the choice of your career field wasn’t all that was involved. As a
teller, you have the opportunity to help your investment increase in value
every day. Whenever a customer approaches your window, you have a
fresh chance to grow in your job, a job that can be as interesting and
rewarding as you would like it to be.
Time, like money, can be hidden away and lost … or it can be
nurtured into growth. The banking business provides the opportunity for
growth. Regardless of how long or short a time you have been part of
that business, this book is meant to help you along the way. It has been
revised and expanded once again to reflect the many recent changes
that have taken place as they relate to tellers.
Joan German-Grapes
“Bankability” Still
INTRODUCTION:
The first edition of this book introduced a new word to the language
—“bank-ability.” It is not in any dictionary. It is a noun, derived from the
adjective “bankable,” which means “receivable as good at a financial
institution,” and from the noun “ability,” which means the quality of being
able to do something.
“Bankability” means being able to do something of high quality. This
includes the part financial institutions have played in the past in our
society and the part they play now and will play in the future. It also
includes the role of each individual within his or her financial institution.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
Banking is about money. Financial institutions safeguard it, invest it, lend
it, transfer it, and otherwise handle it for the benefit of the people and
businesses in a community. People need money—not just in the sense
of being able to pay bills, but to make things more efficient. Everyone
remembers reading about the old barter system under which a farmer,
for example, traded chickens for a pair of shoes … but what happened if
the cobbler didn’t like chicken? Either the farmer went barefoot or the
cobbler ate chicken anyway. Money made things easier. The farmer sold
his chickens and used the cash he received to pay for the shoes he
needed. And the cobbler bought what he wanted.
Coins
The idea of money originated about 2,700 years ago in Lydia when
someone came up with the idea of coins. A coin is a piece of metal,
stamped by the authority of a government as a guarantee of its value,
that is used as money. Originally, the metal used was one with a value of
its own, such as gold, silver, nickel, bronze, or copper. A truly great idea!
Instead of barter, a universal medium of exchange. But coins have
disadvantages. For one thing, they are inconvenient to carry around. So
approximately 350 years ago, paper money—or currency—was invented.
The Origins of Paper Money
Everyone knows that money is important. We use it as a medium of
exchange for purchasing goods and services of every description. Few
people, however, know that our modern currency got its start because
the King of England was broke!
People in many parts of the world once kept their gold and silver in
the vault of a “goldsmith,” who charged them a fee for the safekeeping.
London merchants, however, kept theirs in the Tower of London. About
1640, King Charles I found that his credit was exhausted, so in order to
get funds he seized the gold in the Tower of London. This upset the
merchants so much that they lent the king £40,000 to get their gold back.
And when they got it back, they put it with the goldsmiths, not in the
Tower! The goldsmiths were very honest, and the receipts they issued for
the deposited funds began to circulate in place of the actual gold. In
other words, people were spending the receipts while the gold itself
stayed locked in the vaults.
Until recently, most of our paper money was simply receipts for gold
and silver stored in government vaults, such as the one at Fort Knox. But
most of our paper money today is in the form of “Federal Reserve
Notes,” which are issued by government authorization and backed by the
assets of the Federal Reserve Banks.
The value of the enormous amount of goods and services we
produce each year, which is so much greater than the amount of gold
and silver that would be needed in circulation to pay for them, has
caused us to devise new kinds of “money.” Checks enable people to
“write their own money.” Loans from financial institutions are usually
credited to the borrower’s account and actual cash rarely changes
hands. Credit cards, checks, and other devices ease the strain on our
money supply.
How Banking Began
Banking actually began before the first coins were minted in Lydia. About
1,000 years before that time, an elaborate system of barter was
established in ancient Egypt. And about 4,000 years ago, financial
institutions, similar to modern ones, were in existence in Babylon under
the supervision of priests in the religious temples. Approximately 1,500
