I recently made the move to a credit union.  It was one of the best financial moves I have ever made, and its made me think a lot about the banking industry in general.

Some time ago I figured out that banks make most of their money on “commercial” clients.  That explains why a “business” account has about a million extra fees associated with it.  If you’ve never looked at the cost of having a commercial bank account, don’t.  It’s depressing.

And that’s probably the first reason I like credit unions.  They focus on consumer “retail” banking, and they do a darned good job of it.  It’s an odd feeling to walk into a branch and be greeted by smiling tellers who know me by name; it’s an even stranger feeling to actually understand the fee structure of my bank account because it’s so darned simple.

But it goes a bit beyond that.  When I closed my Bank of America account, they had assessed any number of
“inactivity” fees since I really hadn’t used it for a few months.  After a rather long game of staring at the banking officer helping me close the account, he agreed to refund them.  The account was promptly closed.

But was it?  Oh, no - turns out that the refund took some time to process, and then the account stayed in a “pending” state until they figured out what to do with the small balance left in the account.  I called them a month later (when I received another statement for a supposedly closed account) and asked what we needed to do to close this account for good.  They said that they had to send me the money.  OK then - send me a check.  Easy enough.  It arrived two days later.

So why didn’t they just send me a check in the mail in the first place?  Better yet, why don’t they NOT charge me for inactivity on an account?  Imagine - they charge me when I want to do something with my money, and they charge me when I don’t do anything with it.  They might as well use this slogan: “whether you do anything with your money or not, we’re still going to get a lot of it”.

And it’s not just Bank of America.  It’s all of them.

Thankfully, my credit union seems to have a grasp of common logic, and it’s becoming a very good relationship indeed.

2 comments
Posted in Blog
Written on Tue, 29 April 2008 at 8:56 am
Tags: banking, credit unions, money
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