r/TalesFromYourBank

I had this in a comment on a prior post but wanted to share it with a larger audience.
I once printed out a mockup of a dollar bill on an entire piece of legal paper and kept it in my teller station. When a customer inevitably asks for their cash back in all large bills I would pull that sucker out and say “is this large enough?” with a cheeky grin on my face.
My retail leader made me get rid of it though because it wasn’t legal to photocopy real money/was counterfeit money. it wasn’t worth the fight to keep the fun going but man did I give some customers a laugh that week.

Hi all, hoping this is the right place to ask my questions. If not, I apologize.

I just got done with my phone interview with M&T Bank for a part time teller position. I am hopeful I will get an in person interview, and was told I should hear back by Monday at the latest. I am hoping I get the job and can turn this into an actual career.

I was told by the phone interviewer to do some research on the bank, so I figured I would come here and hopefully hear from folks who might've worked there in the past? What kind of experiences people have had with them, and just what people have to say about them in general.

I was also told to have 2 thought provoking questions? Currently the 2 I have are; 1. "What would be expected of me if I wanted to move into a fraud prevention department?" (fraud and scam prevention is something I think I want to do long term currently, and I love helping people.) 2. How are long term employees treated at M&T? Are these good questions to ask? Any recommendations for better ones?

Thank you all for your time reading, have a good day!

**Looking for advice on getting hired as a bank teller**
Hi everyone! I’m currently trying to get my foot in the door and get hired as a bank teller. I’ve been applying to teller positions and would really appreciate any advice from people who currently work in banking or have experience hiring tellers.
I’m especially wondering:
What do banks look for when hiring entry-level tellers?
Is previous banking experience usually required?
What can I do to make my resume stand out?
What are some common mistakes people make during teller interviews?
Is there anything you wish you knew before applying?
I’m willing to learn and work hard, and I’m really hoping to find an opportunity where I can build professional experience and grow with the company.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you! 😊

Hi all,
I recently got a position at Wells Fargo as an associate personal banker. I am no stranger to banking. I started as a universal banker and got promoted to a senior banker at another FI. I know as an apb you will be on teller as well. From my previous experience as a universal banker I did more teller than platform. Is that how it is here ? I am quite curious of the day to day.

Any advice or experiences shared would be greatly appreciated.

I am a teller at a credit union, and we have become pretty strict about cash withdrawals that are $5k-$10k (before CTR). The managers and higher ups have us push cashier’s check instead, which is fine, but insist that we ask what the cash is for. Obviously it is to protect people from being scammed, and we do inform the member about fraud and the risks of carrying that much cash, but they usually get upset and don’t understand why they have to provide a reason. I am still new so it’s quite awkward to have these discussions with members. I also work in a very wealthy city where $5k is basically nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars that are just in their checking account alone. Just wanted to know anyone else’s experiences!

Cause what the fuck is 37 20s…

We generally only have one person on ITM a day. They’re in a separate part of the building and generally ignored most of the day. Sometimes that’s a good thing.
We have 4 ITM machines. One is too loud and management acts like there’s nothing they can do about it. One outright refuses to take checks most of the time. shrug “what are you gonna do?” If people complain about the speakers being garbled there’s no attempt to fix it at all. If we turn off 2 of the lanes, people will still come through and request a teller in those lanes. I know for a fact you can turn off the ability for certain machines to call a teller. If you care to. They just can’t be arsed. It’s on the settings but you have to have permission to access it, which I don’t.
We’re berated if we even talk about messing with the settings but they won’t do it to make the experience more pleasant for everyone. Anyone else have these issues?

anyone else? been a teller for 7 months, the radio's on all the time (even before the customers come in!) and the lights are so bright. i have to lay down for at least an hour after work every day in a dark room and i can still hear the radio. i know this isn't banking specific, but most of the reason i picked banking instead f another retail path was to avoid the radio. does it drive anyone else insane? it's to the point where i'm genuinely considering quitting without anything lined up bc of it

I’m 21 and recently graduated with a Finance degree. I’ve been working at a bank for about 2 years, currently as a Relationship Banker. My current role is pretty broad. I work with clients on deposits, credit cards, consumer lending, referrals, account opening, etc. I also make around 10 outbound calls per day and have quarterly sales/referral goals. I’ve had some success with lending and investment referrals, and I’ve also been selected for a special branch conversion assignment.

Long term, I want to move toward wealth management / financial advising / investments, rather than stay in retail banking. I’ve been trying to move in that direction for a while. I’m also working on getting my securities licenses and recently passed my SIE.

A Private Bank Analyst – Portfolio Manager position opened in my area, so I applied internally. The role is basically an entry-level position supporting a Portfolio Manager in the Private Bank, working with high-net-worth clients and getting exposure to portfolio management, investment analysis, client service, and the broader
Private Bank team. I got an interview with the Private Bank manager next week.

From what I understand, Private Bank has teams involving Portfolio Managers, Wealth Advisors, Trust/Estate specialists, and other wealth-management professionals, so I’m hoping this could potentially be a much better long-term path toward wealth management than staying in my current retail banker role.

I’m interested in hearing from anyone who has worked in private banking, wealth management, portfolio management, or Huntington specifically.
I’m pretty excited about the opportunity because I’ve been trying to get out of traditional retail banking and into investments/wealth management, but I don’t want to make a move that puts me on the wrong career track. Does anyone have experience in the private bank sector or any knowledge on if it is a good career path long term?

Hi all!

Been in banking for two years now and preform pretty well every month (80+ percentile across the company). However, there is one banker at the branch who is nastiest shark alive… he goes after everyone with every product relentlessly. 80 year old woman who can’t log into her OLB? She will walk out with a two extra savings accounts and an auto loan. High school student who just turned 18? Let’s get him his first credit card and lock what little savings he has into a CD…

I have studying how he does it too… instead of being explicit im what he is saying, he uses vague terminology. For example… “Let me fix this for you” really means we are going to upgrade you to a different account and I won’t tell you about the qualifications. Or, “give me a second to do make this right” means we are going to open a second account so you can have multiple ways to save. A few times, people have called him out and it’s hilarious. They will say “wait… we NEED to do this or you are asking me?”however 9/10 times his tricks work and he gets what he wants….

Have you guys ever seen such “sharky” behavior in your branches before?? I just can’t watch this anymore and the daily gloating is really getting to me.

I work for a super-regional bank. Twice this year, I've seen this pattern:

1. Customer opens a new bank accout

2. 1-2 weeks later they deposit money

3. On the day of step 2, they try to deposit a Chase-drawn check, but the check is either stolen or forged

I have not seen this with other bank-drawn checks, so why are Chase-drawn checks used the most in new account fraud?

This was early 2012. I was a customer sales representative/banker and a client came in furious, ready to close every account she had with us. She’d been dealing with something for weeks and felt like nobody was listening to her. So I spent around 4 hours on it. Went through everything, fixed what I could fix, explained what I couldn’t. By the end she told me she was still unhappy with the bank but she was going to keep her accounts open because of how I handled it. I felt good about that. Thought I’d done the job. Then my the branch manager called me into her office and asked me if I have opened any new accounts and when she found out the answer is none other that keeping the current accounts, she told me I’d wasted my time. Said if I was going to sit with a client that long I should have been selling her more products, not just providing customer service. That was the feedback. Not “nice save,” but “you used hours of selling time on someone who didn’t buy anything.” She asked me to stay longer and work on getting new accounts, i did stay longer but to wrote my resignation letter. I did not have the savings for it. I was genuinely worried about rent. But something about being told that helping the client was the mistake just broke whatever was keeping me there.

Four years later the fake accounts thing blew up and everyone acted shocked. I wasn’t. That pressure was already in the building in 2012, it just hadn’t produced a headline yet. When your metrics only count products opened and nothing counts for keeping a client from walking out the door, you’re going to get what you measure. Eventually somebody starts opening accounts nobody asked for.

Anyway. Not really looking for anything here, it just comes back to me sometimes. Anybody had fake or accounts they did not apply for at any of the big banks?

I’ve been holding onto this for a while for legal reasons but I don’t care about going that route anymore so here goes.

I was a teller at Wells Fargo last year. I had fantastic numbers, was very close with all my coworkers, customers really liked me, and I was a very adaptive employee. I was hired as part-time and promoted to full-time within 2.5 months, something that never happens at that branch. 8 months in while balancing at the end of the day, I was short 4 grand. The other teller I was closing with went through the outage checklist with me to check everything we could. At that point we were already a few minutes over the time we were supposed to leave. Wells Fargo became EXTREMELY strict about being over hours around a year ago so we were forced to rush through the checklist and did not complete it as thoroughly as we should have.

I was told by my coworkers and manager that I shouldn’t worry, people have been short much larger amounts and it’s always been found after reviewing transactions logs and/or cameras. None of us heard anything for two months. One day, I get an email from HR, saying they need to interview me about an incident. I figured it was about this, and after asking my coworker, it definitely was.

In the phone interview, they made me promise I was not recording and was in a completely private area with nobody around. Unsurprisingly, they had me explain the process of what happened two months ago when I was short 4k, and what I think happened to it. I mentioned a transaction I had suspected I did incorrectly but they confirmed I did it the right way and didn’t give anyone free money.

They then told me they had video footage of me on camera counting a strap of 50s, putting my hands under my counter, and the money disappearing. I questioned that, obviously, since I never stole anything. I asked if my drawer was partially opened and the cameras couldn’t see it be placed back inside because my body was covering it, or something similar. They said no, that’s not possible.

Any of you WF employees know a small strap of 50s is $1k and a large strap is $5k. My money counter automatically stops counting when the bills reach the preset amount of 1k or 5k. It was an older machine so you can’t type in a specific number, it has to be 1k or 5k for 50s and will automatically switch to the correct bill type. For example, if I had it set on 20s, it would automatically switch to 50s by detecting the weight of the bill. So it doesn’t make any sense for me to have stolen 4k worth of 50s, it pretty much just wouldn’t be possible based off of what they told me. Oh and the fact that I DID NOT STEAL ANYTHING.

After the interview I was incredibly shaken up. My manager had to take me out of cash and I cried the whole time and had to go home early because my body betrays me when I am upset (very unfortunate curse). I lobby engaged the following two weeks. Utterly ridiculous waste of my time and their money considering I sat at a computer doing nothing most of the time, or if the line was long I got to be berated by angry customers for asking them if they could use the ATM for their transaction (valid of the customers to be upset in my opinion). My coworkers and manager were still so supportive and confident everything would turn out alright. Everyone at that branch knew I’d never do such a thing, or so I thought.

After two weeks, I came to work in the morning and was fired. The manager told me I was being fired for theft. Yes, those were their exact words. For theft. I asked for the supposed video evidence and was told I have to call HR for any questions. Have you ever tried calling HR for something other than benefit information? It is pretty much impossible. WF never tried to get the money back either. If they really thought I stole a felony level sum, don’t you think they’d try to get it back? Especially if they claim to have me on video? It’d be an open and shut case. But they don’t. This whole incident has made me go crazy, there was a point that I considered the possibility of hallucinating an entire day and stealing it while basically unconscious. Obviously that didn’t happen, but that’s how manipulative they were. This is a situation where I think the term “gaslighting” is truly appropriate.

Only one of my coworkers contacted me a couple weeks after the firing and I met up with them to get something I left at the branch back (I was never going back there, that’s for sure). I was told by this person that everyone thinks I did it. Even the person I considered to be my best friend. I know that’s my fault for believing my coworker could actually be my friend but believe me when I tell you that was a deep betrayal.

All of my accounts and my credit card were with them, and they closed it. I applied for accounts at Chase and was denied. My beautiful credit score dropped to 690.

I applied for and was approved for unemployment. On the literal day of the deadline for WF to dispute my unemployment, they filed for a trial. My state government is now sending me collections letters for the thousands of dollars they paid me. I appealed a month ago and haven’t heard anything back (yes I confirmed with the state it was received) so I guess I’ll just hope they don’t garnish my other bank accounts.

I just wanted to share this with anyone who works at Wells Fargo or who is considering employment with them. WELLS FARGO FALSELY ACCUSED ME OF THEFT AND FIRED ME FOR IT.

Has anyone else faced this situation:

I left my last role at Chase as ABME(which is just teller and basic account openings) because of the blatant favoritism and lack of equal opportunity for growth.

I was there for 3.5 years and saw people get into the licensed banker role that were there for less or equal time.

Hell, I even trained my supervisor (whom got the role over me) on how to work the ATMs.

I gave em my 2 weeks and moved into a smaller, community bank.

Now, im making more money at this bank but it’s been a goddamn mess.
I joined during a merge/buy out and there’s a lack of structure and policies. It’s all figure it out as you go but you’ll still get blamed for mistakes no one knows to fix.

Beside the better pay; I work in a super affluent neighborhood.
We’ve already surpassed our quarterly quota and I’m set to receive my bonus meanwhile I mostly sit down all day on my phone.

Anyways; I can’t stay here for long. I need somewhere establish and steady where growth and opportunities have been there.

I’m thinking of going back to a bigger bank or pivoting all together because I don’t want to be a banker anymore.

Anyone else?

I just started at new smaller regional bank in Jersey area. My previous bank/branch was very busy, but I honestly didn’t mind it. This new branch is extremely slow from what I’ve seen so far (I’m still in training). I think maybe 10-15 people walk in per day on average. I don’t know how I’m gonna hit my goals… anybody have advice for working in a very slow branch?

You know what I mean. Every branch has that one colleague. They constantly make unbelievably stupid errors. They've got over a decade of experience but you'd think it was their first day. They have no common sense, lose customers left and right, but inexplicably suffer no consequences.

Mine was our ABM. She'd been at the bank for 17 years, but when a large relationship customer asked how to pay his credit card from another bank, she told him it was impossible. Guy freaked out and she just amplified, telling him "I know, right? It's awful; I'm on your side."

I ran over and stopped him from closing his accounts, directing him to the app and showing him how it was done. I was written up for insubordination.

That was me. I want to hear your stories!

Just turned 30 and got my first ever job working in a bank. I’ve done retail and fast food my whole life.

Any tips on how to make this a career?
Any tips on what to NEVER do?
Where do you buy your ties?
Belt or suspenders?

I have so many and I only worked at my branch for 10 months. I love reading y’all’s stories so please share

1. Robbed during an audit. Robber went to the next door business and waited for cops. Had actually just been released from prison for robbing a bank but was basically dying from disease and couldn’t afford it so they wanted to go back to prison to receive healthcare

2. Convicted pedophile banned for sexually harassing me and then filed a complaint with the company saying I sexually harassed him

3. Customer sent letters to my branch telling me to use ProActive for my acne (I had never spoken to this man). When he was banned he sent a final letter saying I was just taking out my insecurities on him because no man would ever find me attractive. Mind you my acne is so mild. A lot of customers felt compelled to comment on my acne for whatever reason.

4. Special needs customer was with his mom and silently shat his pants as I conducted his transaction. They walked out without saying a word and the customer behind them informed me of what happened. For some reason everyone in line was unbothered by the pile of feces on the ground and continued doing their transactions with me. Couldn’t get ahold of biohazard team, pretty much all of management was on PTO. A personal banker had to clean it up

So you borrow the bank’s money, do not pay it off on time or ever, and expect the bank to not charge a late fee? Just because you potentially have 250k outside and will move it over if the bank can guarantee to never charge a late fee ever again? Of all the entitled people I’ve met I have never seen this kind of entitlement lol. And the audacity to say… “well other credit cards do that for me so I’m not interested in your credit cards.”

Hi all,

I’m a personal banker at a large U.S. bank, but I’m originally from another country, and my entire family still lives there.

I came to the U.S. for college, so I used to spend around four months a year back home. Now, after 10 months in a full-time banking position, I can only visit for about 15 days a year.

I’m happily married here and plan to build my life and raise a family in the U.S., but one of my biggest goals is finding a way to spend more time with my parents, brother, and grandparents.

My bank offers plenty of opportunities for growth, including courses, certifications, and degree programs. The thing is, I’m not necessarily looking for a higher salary. What I’m really looking for is geographical flexibility.

In a couple of months, I’ll be eligible to apply for other positions within the bank. Ideally, I’d like a role that would allow me to work remotely, even if only temporarily, so I could spend a month working from my home country each year.

For those of you with banking experience, what roles would you recommend? I’m open to anything.