(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)
I’m not going to rant anymore. Here are some bemused observations instead.
So-called online banking is a lot more work than it’s worth, especially if you don’t have more than a few dozen transactions per month.
In the time I have spent this evening dealing with download capabilities of 3 different banks and Quickbook’s peculiar import conventions, I could have simply entered all the transactions by hand,
probably in both spreadsheets and Quickbooks.
Obfuscation pays
The sad thing is that I don’t really see a market opportunity until banks will allow customers to download more then 6 weeks of transactions electronically. Bank of America allows up to 1 year previous downloads (as does SmithBarney), the other two (nameless) banks do not. If you don’t download your transactions every month, you’re out of luck.
One of these banks is billing me $14.95 for a Quickbooks “connection,” which requires a PIN, which they never sent through the mail. I’ll have to go down there in person (during banker hours of course) to get it fixed. Won’t be for a month or so, don’t have time at my hourly rate to screw around with ~$15.
Upshot: entering all your transactions by hand uncovers all sorts of little fees and charges, some of which fall into the category of “I don’t remember asking for that.”
The bank with the most heinous web interface has the best service. The bank with the worst service has the best web interface, which is a good thing since they stopped sending me paper statements even though I never asked them to stop. The other bank has the most “submarine charges,” weirdo fees and requirements for accounts. Like mandatory savings accounts with mandatory automatic transfers every month. That’s weird. Must be some sort of accounting/risk analysis thingie allowing them to leverage their cash balance for borrowing against their liabilities.
The Barnacle Model
Did you know that Bank of America earned $22,000,000,000 last year on fees and penalties? Isn’t that amazing? It amazes me. There isn’t much production cost related to that kind of income, just a few Terms of Service brochures, some postage. I know I pay penalties when the penalty cost is lower than my revenue earned when not paying. And I am sure I pay fees I don’t even know about. One little fee at a time, induces a lot of financial drag.
Update
The bank with the best customer service just called me on my cell phone, using a real “800″ return number. I am going to keep my account there a while longer to see what transpires.
Udpate 2: This is rich…
Bank of America is suffering a “Service Outage.”
The rich part of this is that the page announcing the service outage also delivers what has got to be the default icon for backend technology… the Sun Microsystems logo!
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