Episode
More than a transaction: What Happened to the Career Teller?
- Podcast
- Fraud Forward
- Published
- Aug 19, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3062
- Processing state
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- https://www.sardine.ai/media/fraud-forward
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Summary
What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward! This one started with a can of hairspray. Jen Lamont and I were getting ready for a networking event, and somehow a conversation about hair products turned into a conversation about the future of fraud prevention in banking. Because we ended up talking about her mom. A career teller in banking for decades. Someone who knew multiple generations of families, who turned down promotions to stay at the window because she loved the people, who took pride in the role in ways that I think a lot of institutions have quietly trained out of the job. And that got me asking a question I haven't been able to shake since: have we made it harder for the people closest to our customers to actually see them? We still call tellers our first line of defense. But we've also loaded that line with sales goals, referral quotas, transaction time expectations, compliance responsibilities, and lobby metrics. Meanwhile, fraud has gotten more human than ever. Scammers aren't just stealing credentials anymore. They're manipulating customers into moving the money themselves. And the only person standing between a coached customer and a wire going out the door is often a teller who has been measured on everything except whether they noticed something felt wrong. Jen brings a perspective to this conversation that I think is rare and really important. She's a fraud professional who grew up watching her mom build a full career at the teller window. She's seen what that role looks like when it's valued, and she's spent years as a practitioner trying to figure out how to rebuild some of that in institutions where the teller role has shifted into something almost unrecognizable. This is not a conversation about blame. It's a conversation about wh…