The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City is a bank for banks. The major services provided to banks are check processing and electronic funds transfers.

The Kansas City Check Collection Unit of the Retail Payments Services Department works 23 hours a day, six days a week. Recurring electronic payments, such as direct deposit of payroll and Social Security benefits, are processed by the Automated Clearing House (ACH) area of the consolidated ACH operations site at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. These payments flow through FedACH, an electronic transfer system developed and maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank. The Fed ACH system processed approximately 8.4 billion ACH payments totaling $15.5 trillion in 2004. An example is when a corporation instructs its financial institution to send a payroll credit to the company's employees. The employee's financial institution receives the payroll credit and initiates a direct deposit into the employee's account.

One-time, large dollar transactions are typically conducted over Fedwire, an electronic funds and securities transfer system developed and maintained by the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's Wholesale Operations Site is responsible for providing Fedwire Funds and Securities services to customers in six Federal Reserve districts: Richmond, Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City and San Francisco. A typical funds transaction might involve a Kansas City corporation instructing its bank to pay an invoice to a New York corporation. The Kansas City corporation's bank would then transfer the money over Fedwire from its account at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City to the account of the New York corporation's bank at the Federal Reserve of New York.

In addition, the Kansas City Reserve Bank fills orders for currency and coin from financial institutions. Then, when these institutions have too much cash on hand or have currency that is too dirty or worn to stay in circulation, they deposit it here. The Fed checks the cash to determine if it's still in good condition, destroys unfit currency, and weeds out counterfeits. In the Tenth District, counterfeits have been a relatively small problem.

Finally, banks, as well as other depository institutions, can access Federal Reserve credit through the Discount Window.