Your Bank

[Square]

I had a regional bank called Commercial Federal for a number of years but they were bought by Bank of the West a couple years ago. I'm really starting to hate BotW. I've been a little too apathetic to change but I'll probably jump to another (more local/regional) bank soon.

[PSULions]

BoA does not charge me for it.

 

Online Banking is one of the best things about banking with BAC. They offer it for free and it is a smart thing, as it is what we in the Banking industry call a "sticky" product. The more you use it, the more you get hooked on it. I have 30 + payees listed, do many recurring payments to local utilities CCs, etc. They have a new feature called "My Portfolio" that allows you to link into your loans, investments, Credit Cards, list your house and get updates via Zillow.com to basically replace the need for using Quicken, as it gives me the ability to track my investments, loans, CC balances, cash flows, set up a monthly budget and put my transactions into the various budget classifications and it automatically updates everything when every I get into my account. It saves me a lot of money in stamps, as I can't remember the last time, I actually paid a bill by writing a check and using an envelope (probably 4 or 5 books of stamps).

 

What makes sense for the Bank is once you get into it and load it up with everything, it makes it very difficult to close your account and move it somewhere else. So for the Bank the free service really pays dividends by boosting deposits, retaining customers and saving processing of many of the typcial transactions that people write checks for. I think it was one of the best ideas that the Bank has every come up with and one of the reasons why BAC is the leading Bank in national deposits.

[H8tank]

I use one main bank, and a credit union.

 

Recently for a large purchase, the credit union balked, said I didn't have enough verifiable income.

 

So I went to my local banker, he said he'd make it work, and he did. Got a good rate too.