Banking is centered around people—people like you, your relatives, and your friends. Banking involves people dedicated to performing a variety of financial services for others to help make their lives happier, easier, and more productive. Banking is not the typical fortresslike granite structure in the country village or the soaring stainless steel and glass tower rising from the city street. Behind the façade you find people, thousands and thousands of men and women who are performing a tremendous variety of jobs, most of whom are proud of their responsibilities, eager to please the public they serve, and eager for promotions to more challenging and better paying positions.
Since you are interested in learning about this business, the rewards it may offer, and how you might tailor your talents to it, in the chapters that follow we will sketch the romance of banking, suggest what it is like today to work in a bank, and show the multitude of opportunities awaiting those who choose a banking career. Perhaps one of the most intriguing things about banking is that regardless of your interest or skills, the industry is almost certain to have a place for you.
Banking is not just receiving and paying out money at a teller's window—the only part of banking that most people ever see. Banking is high finance—lending money to distant kings and small grocers alike; it is public relations and advertising; it is helping people buy their homes, automobiles, refrigerators, and all the other things they need or want; it is regulating the nation's economy; it is running gigantic computers that transfer huge sums of money without ever touching a dollar bill; it is counseling foreigners who barely speak English on how to manage their financial affairs; it is helping establish scholarships to enable more young Americans to attend college. It is all these things and many many more, but most of all, banking is people—an honorable and useful occupation! And inasmuch as banking is people, the ways that banks operate reflect the imagination, the hard work, and the goals of the men and women connected with them.
