Bank Examiner Job Description, Career as a Bank Examiner, Salary, Employment

Training/Educational Requirements: Bachelor’s degree

Median Salary: $68,037 per year

Job Prospects: Good

Job Description

A bank examiner works on audits of various financial institutions. Bank examiners must be well-versed in different laws, processes, and procedures that banks must follow, and then they must ensure that the banks are actually adhering to all of these. Examiners inspect various records and reports to ensure that a bank is compliant with everything that they are supposed to be carrying out.

Bank examiners review all pertinent records and reports to determine the financial health and status of a given bank. They then put all of this information into a report that they can provide to the company or government agency which they work for. Bank examiners generally work with multiple banks, look through all financial records not only to produce reports for their own employers but to offer improvements and recommendations to the financial institutions they studied.

As a bank examiner works in a true auditing capacity, they may examine everything having to do with the banks that they oversee, including payroll records, hiring practices, the amount of cash kept on hand, the way in which tellers handle client requests, and every other practice and method used within a bank. Bank examiners must understand how banks and the overall financial system works to be able to properly do their job.

Bank examiners may move into supervisory types of roles as they move throughout their career. They may oversee a team of auditors, and deal with the top management at the banks that they are auditing. Examiners may act as a liaison between those who work at the financial institutions they are studying and the government agency that they themselves work for. They may always work at some level of auditing or overseeing, but they may also become more involved in providing recommendations for individual bank improvement.

Training/Educational Requirements

There are a few colleges that offer specific programs or degrees in bank examination. This is the most ideal educational background for somebody interested in working as a bank examiner, but it is certainly not a requirement. It is important to have a bachelor’s degree, preferably in finance or some aspect of business.

There is training throughout the career of a bank examiner. Because there are new procedures and laws that come into play all the time, it’s important that bank examiners keep up with those. This is sure to mean a fair amount of training as bank examiners progress through their careers, particularly when they are just getting started and when they are working to move to the next step in their career.

How to Get Hired

The best way to get hired initially is to have some sort of education or coursework in finance, but this is usually only a way to get a foot in the door. Having experience auditing is another excellent way to get hired, as this will be instrumental in success on the job. As bank examiners work throughout their careers, keeping up with training and gaining experience within their industry and specific role will help them to get hired into new roles.

Job Prospects, Employment Outlook, and Career Development

Bank examiners can expect to find jobs pretty easily, as this is an important role in the financial industry. With greater attention being given to financial institutions and how they conduct their business, this provides even greater demand for bank examiners overall. This is good news for those who wish to enter the field and for those who already work within it and wish to move up. Those bank examiners that have solid auditing experience and who are trained in the most recent procedures should have the easiest time finding a job in this field.

Working Environment

Typically bank examiners travel from financial institution to financial institution to perform the necessary audits. Though they usually have an office of their own, they may spend a great deal of their time on the road. This means some rather long and unusual hours when the bank examiners are performing audits. There can be stressful environments for the bank examiner, as when they provide recommendations for improvement or put together reports that may not be well received. Bank examiners work as a liaison, so they may spend part of their time in meetings or on conference calls, part of their time in an office preparing for an audit, and a good majority of their time traveling to banks to handle the actual audits.

Salary and Benefits

The typical salary earned by a bank examiner is around $68,037 per year. There is quite a wide range in the salary that a bank examiner may earn, however, from as low as $53,080 to as high as $94,200 per year. The financial institution that the bank examiner works for, the geographical location that he or she work within, and the experience brought to the job can all be factors in the salary that the examiner earns each year. Additionally, some bank examiners have more responsibilities than others, and some are part of a team with people working under them, and these can also contribute to the variance in the salary range. A bank examiner can usually expect to receive rather generous benefits, including paid vacation, sick days, and holidays, a pension plan, medical coverage, and potentially even others, as dictated by the examiner’s employer directly.