One, Alex Vandervoort, is honest, hard-charging, and focused on growing FMA through retail banking and embracing emerging technology; the other, Roscoe Heyward, is suave, hypocritical, and skilled in boardroom politics, and favors catering more to business than to consumers.

Owing money to loan sharks, and desperate not to have to go to work for a criminal organization, he tries going back to his former employer to ask for some kind of job.

She is released, but uses her photographic memory to count the amount of time she spent blindfolded in the car and the movements it made, and as a result is able to lead police to the safe house where Eastin was being held and tortured.

Meanwhile, Vandervoort's antagonist, Heyward, is depicted as a devout Episcopalian who strives to maintain an air of personal integrity and morality, only to slowly sacrifice them both in his pursuit of the presidency of FMA.

As these men pursue their battle for the soon-to-be-vacant position of CEO, various issues involving the banking industry, such as credit card fraud, embezzlement, inflation, subprime lending, and insider trading are discussed.

Heyward is manipulated into making a large, illegal and toxic loan to Supranational Corporation (SuNatCo), a multinational conglomerate (loosely based on International Telephone and Telegraph, with certain elements of Penn Central) run by the powerful, unscrupulous CEO, G. G. Quartermain.

One of the banking innovations that Hailey mentioned in The Moneychangers is Docutel, an automated teller machine,[1]: 308  based on real technology that was issued a patent in 1974 in the United States.

Vandervoort, whose clothes looked like they were from the "fashion section of Esquire" and who had the "mannerisms a la Johnny Carson", was not at all like the classical solemn, cautious banker in a double-breasted, dark blue suit.

The breakthrough came when Don Wetzel, Vice President of Product Planning at Docutel, was waiting in a long line for a teller at a bank in Dallas, Texas in 1968.