Originally Posted by Ron Bennett

The main motivation for the small-talk, personal notes, special invitations, etc is building a "banking relationship" with the customer over a period of time to facilitate the upsell of premium bank accounts, business loans, mortgage refinancing, mutual funds, annuities, insurance, etc; are salespeople these days.

Fraud prevention is truly secondary, an after-thought, to the primary mission of bank tellers (aka relationship specialists, etc) of pushing more financial products.