We’re a small community bank and have a good relationship with a lot of our customers. We have a customer whom we feel is starting to mentally deteriorate. We’re very concerned for this person, and want to take preventative action. The customer does have a joint owner on the account, but that person is a friend, not a family member.

We were wondering if anyone has any advice on how to handle this situation? We’re hesitant to say anything to the joint owner since they are not family and would hate to see this customer get taken advantage of. Any suggestions???

You cannot discriminate against the joint owner simply because they are not blood related. They are the legal co-owner of the account and they have those rights for a reason. You don't know the personal circumstances of your customer and why he/she has this particular friend as a joint owner.

The key is that there IS another joint owner on the account and if the bank is concerned about the primary account holder you probably should contact the joint. Why do you assume that the person would be taken advantage of because the person is of no blood relation? I've seen way too many relatives take advantate of family members to give any value to that reasoning.

My advice - contact the joint owner. It's not up to you to decide whether or not they're worthy of being the joint owner. They already have full rights to all the money and information pertaining to that account.

That may have come out wrong... We're hesitant to say anything to the joint owner since we're unsure if it is even our place to get involved. I was not assuming that the joint owner was going to be the one taking advantage of the customer. It would just be terrible to see this customer scammed somehow and not be mentally sound to fully understand.

Ok, sorry, I read that as you didn't want to say anything to the joint owner because they weren't related. My bad

Is this an elderly person? If I were concerned, I would talk to the joint owner (without implying that you think the customer is mentally deteriorating, they could take offense to that). Simply a phonecall to say that you really value your customer, etc, but that the branch (or whoever) was recently concerned about some transactions or conversations (whatever the situation may be) and that you want to ensure everything is ok and that nobody is being taken advantage of, etc.