AMERICAN BANKING METHODS

BANKING METHODS

BY

LEONARD LE MARCHANT MINTY

"

B.Sc. Econ.; B.Com. Certificated Associate of the Institute
of Bankers; City Parochial Exhibitioner 1914;
Mitchell Travelling Exhibitioner 1921,
London University.

WITH AN

INTRODUCTION

BY

SIR DRUMMOND DRUMMOND FRASER,
K.B.E., M.COM.

(Honorary Lecturer on Banking at Manchester University)

LONDON

P. S. KING & SON, LTD.
ORCHARD HOUSE, 2 & 4 GREAT SMITH STREET

WESTMINSTER

115

Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London

PREFACE

THE purpose of this book is, briefly, to give an outline of the plan of organization and methods of handling banking transactions in an American financial institution. It is written throughout from the point of view of an English bank officer anxious to give a practical description to English bank officers of the way in which the work is put through in an American bank. For this reason, many points which to an American reader may seem too obvious to require more than casual mention, have been elaborated, and where important differences exist between English and American practice, some explanation has been given as well of English methods. Because such business is not, as yet, ordinarily undertaken by English banks, several of the functions of trust companies, personal trust, corporate trust and company reorganization have been described at a length disproportionate to their banking importance.

Although it is easy to divide, in theory, the functions of a bank into receiving functions, clearing functions, paying functions, etc., in actual practice it is impossible, and, as a matter of fact, for motives of practical expediency, undesirable to organize departments of a bank to undertake merely these separate functions. In this book the functions of a bank have been described under the various departments which undertake them. It has been attempted, as far as possible, to keep the chapters in their logical and scientific order. This order will not correspond to the order in which departments appear in the elevator directory of any particular bank. Nor is the order in every case exactly logical. The import collections and export collections departments, I have, for instance, put in the section which deals with receiving functions. These departments do receive items which they also collect, and they are usually

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