I'll Be the Teller of Tellers

"Welcome to Bumble Bee Bank, how may I help you?"

     As a customer with valuable money, I bet you pay at least a little attention to the gal or guy that takes your money, gives you money, or you trust to pay your mortgage. Working at a bank being a "teller," since I was 18 years old with a tall figure, blonde hair, blue eyes, and a goofy wide smile has earned me some skeptical looks and questions when I am handed a check for $50,000 to apply to 3 loans, a mortgages, and a deposit. I got the feeling that I was not completely trusted to handle such a task, but little did they know that those were more or less the simple transactions.

     Many people do not realize the responsibilities that a "teller" has accumulated over the last handful of years. The reason I put quotation marks around the word is because that hardly describes the job at all. My title was a Financial Services Specialist, level One.

I could deposit checks into checking accounts, IRAs, HSAs, savings accounts, money market accounts; 
I could apply checks to mortgages, overdraft, home equity, line of credit, personal loans, auto loans, credit cards, collateral loans; 
I could cash checks for cash, withdrawals, Treasurer's Checks, money orders; 
I could do coin orders and cash change orders in any variety of variations; 
I could deposit your cash into any of the accounts or loans mentioned before or turn it into a check; 
I could encode personal checks, withdrawal tickets, or deposit tickets for you with the appropriate numbers; or 
I could help you turn your buckets and buckets of coin into dollar bills. And those were just the straight forward tasks.

     The slightly more difficult tasks would be working with our commercial lenders and mortgage specialists to cut closing checks, vendor checks, and applying new restrictions to accounts.

     Don't forget about all the personal relations we encounter every single day. Customers come in with questions about their account activity, the variety of products we offer, changes of address, reordering checks, broken or lost debit cards, "hot carding" and "warm carding" stolen and lost cards, disputing charges on the account, forgetting their online passwords, forgetting their pins, trying to cash checks for family or friends, and more financial questions you could possibility think of.

   The next component of working on the front line is probably the biggest. Security. Both with the physical money and the account information/protection. On the paperwork side, we need to determine what checks needs holds and how that process works, we complete the necessaries when large amounts of cash come in, and we have to file and order all signature cards and make sure they match your identity. The physical security measures are probably quite obvious with our ginormous vault, safety deposit boxes, ATM vault, night drop vault, and numerous audits of counting our money every day.

     Technology has played a big part in how we do things nowadays though. Now Bumble Bee bank has ECRs which are kinda like little vaults that usually two tellers share each. The ECR can take the money, sort it, count it, or give you the exact denominations we ask for. It's an amazing tool for us to use and it makes it a lot more difficult to rob!