Being that you know a lot of "stuff" then im sure we can jump past the whole making sure laptops are locked down with AV, a firewall, and disk encryption where applicable.

The person at the bank was probably right. The login page is just a form on an unencrypted page but the form action is likely set to an address over HTTPS, so once you hit that submit button your computer is talking to the bank site over SSL which will encrypt your traffic. So, even if someone is keeping an eagle eye on the traffic being passed over the open access point, you've got strong end-to-end encryption from your browser all the way to the bank.

You can be pretty confident that your people will be OK doing online banking over open wifi. One thing you'd have to worry about is making sure it's free PUBLIC wifi, as accessing someone's personal connection is a tad bit illegal. Also, as AK mentioned, you're biggest security threat comes from malware silently installed through the swiss cheese IE browser (among others). There are many different types, most of which intentionally bog down or altogether break your computer's functionality until you purchase their "virus/malware/spyware cleaner" products, but a good number also harvest login information for websites and send 'em back to be logged somewhere. Another threat to worry about is phishing. As a network security officer I drilled phishing awareness into the heads of my entire network and mass-mailed e-mail phishing examples constantly. Most banks even have a visible link on their main page to the latest phishing and email scams that are plaguing their specific organization.

Hopefully the above puts you somewhat at ease and gives you some extra things to think about in regards to your users overseas.