Friday, June 10, 2011

Chartered Banks, Arrogant Dictators?

Banks, just plain bug me.They think it is their right to dictate how and when you can withdraw your money! You are not the customer, to be served, you are the sacrificial lamb to be striped of your money in anyway they demand. Want a loan for a car, go to them on bended knee. Think you can buy a house, better check with them first. Want to deposit a cheque, expect them to put a hold on it, no matter what your history is with the bank. They just don't care about you.

Here is my example. I got a cheque from a company that is not my employer, but they are a huge company that happens to deal with my bank. I go to deposit the cheque into my account, and they tell me that they HAVE to put a hold on the cheque. They know the cheque is good. They know I am a good customer, but they still HOLD the cheque for 5 working days. How can they justify that in this day and age? A cheque clears within a day, banks still feel it is their right to hold your money for 7 days. If this would have been a pay cheque, I would have been screwed! The teller and manager both told me that it was perfectly legal for the bank to hold a pay cheque even if they knew the company had the money, and it was a valid cheque.

In the days when I worked for a bank, if a person worked for a company and they came in with a cheque from that company, we would honour it as long as the company had the necessary funds. So what has changed? Have banks become dictators with your money? I think so, that is why I dislike them so much.

What made me even madder was the fact that a teller, by accessing my account told me who I worked for, and obviously knew how much I made, and how much I spent at my nearest Giant Tiger. Why should she have access to this information when all I was doing was depositing a cheque?

When you go into the bank, the teller should be blocked from accessing your account details. They do not need to see that you had a salad from Wendy's yesterday. All they need to know is that you have an account there and that you have the necessary funds for whatever you are doing.

Canadian banks are dictators. They follow their own rules and make you conform to them. They care nothing about you, or your history with the bank. I switched my mortgage out of the TD Canada Trust Bank, and three months later they called me asking how satisfied I was with my mortgage with them. That is have clueless the big chartered banks have become. They care nothing about you.

Banks need to get competitive. We need to stop going into the banks on bended knee to apply for a loan. We need to hit them where it hurts, mortgages. If you borrow 300,000 from them to purchase a house, you end up paying 900,000 or more to own your home, this is gravy to the banks. They do nothing to earn the money, but they reap the rewards, and their shareholders smile.

Stick with the credit unions, when you walk in there, they actually know your name, you are not just an account number. The chartered banks are arrogant because they think you have nowhere else to go but to them. If you do go to them, they become dictators of what you can or can not do with your own money. Most disturbing is that a minimum wage teller can access all your financial information. 

6 comments:

Unknown said...

What do you think of ATB? Which credit union should I trust?

Southern Quebec said...

Welcome to the "real world". I am the Treasurer for a small local church. I went to deposit some money into our Building Fund account this week. As we don't write cheques on this account, we keep the money in a passbook savings account. After depositing the money, I looked at the recent transactions. End of May - $2 charge, end of April - $2 charge. When I asked the teller what this was for, she said, "For having a passbook!!!!"

Last year, they started charging us, are you ready for this? We deposited CASH!!! OMG!!! They have one rate for bills and an even higher one for coins! Thank you CIBC.

KURSK said...

Yes, banks in Canada..lots of fun..

How about what they do with credit card remittance payments over the weekends when they use your money to play the stock markets overseas?..or the juice they make off of administering student loans where there is no chance of a loss to them as the loans are guaranteed by the GOC? How most Canadian banks don't offer interest on your savings accounts yet use your money to fund their ventures and then turn around and nickle and dime you to death with service charges?

Or that they keep the interest on the money accrued through holding funds for 5 business days, even though the cheque has passed through the clearance center the first day?

The biggest scam is that banks are mostly solvent with the help of their customer's funds, and are not required to have much in the way of their own capital? They play with YOUR money, not house money!!

Southern Quebec said...

Kursk:
They make their billions a dime at a time...

West Coast Teddi said...

I must say that I am/have been "happy" with the Bank of Nova Scotia - left the Royal and CIBC many years ago - and haven't looked back. Our Strata Corp. is with Coast Capital (a credit union/bank) in our town and they have been good to us as well.

MONSTER said...

Alex, I am a member (C.U`s you are a shareholding member not a client) of the Servus C.U and have been through three name changes. the service is exalant and frendly and you recieve dividends payed out once a year. i would highly recomend going there.