Banks, the thinking goes, have never met a fee they didn’t like. Yet one credit card charge that has been standard for years—the “foreign transaction” or “foreign currency” fee, which tacks on an extra 3% or so to every hotel stay, meal, or tchotchke purchased outside the U.S.—is slowly but surely being dropped by more and more card issuers. Why?
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is reportedly taking a good, hard look at the practices that credit card giant JP Morgan Chase used in its credit card collections business. American Banker has reported at length on this new “robosigning” bombshell. “The bank’s errors could call into question the legitimacy of billions of dollars [...]
Updated: 6:15 p.m., March 1 Bank fees are in the spotlight again. The Wall Street Journal reported that Bank of America is planning to roll out new checking-account fees, and the news stirred up negative sentiment in the social mediaverse almost immediately, with consumers reacting angrily to the idea. Chase, meanwhile, wants to charge customers even [...]
JPMorgan Chase & Co. is one step closer to a possible settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought against a number of banks over their so-called transaction-ordering practices. “We’re pleased to have reached an agreement in principle,” said spokesman Patrick Linehan, in which the bank has agreed to pay $110 million. That would settle customer claims that [...]
Nonprofit group The Pew Charitable Trusts found that the average length of checking account disclosures is a staggering 111 pages. To cut through the clutter, it proposed a simple, one-page form with basic account fees spelled out — no legal jargon, no tiny fonts. Today, Chase is adopting Pew’s proposal.
A lot of Americans are ticked off at their banks, and a new survey puts some numbers to that sentiment. Consulting firm cg42 says big bank customers will collectively withdraw $185 billion in deposited funds in 2012, and a total of $399 billion is “in jeopardy,” meaning that customers are considering making a switch to [...]
The dust has barely settled over the debit card fee-flap but there’s more news from the big banks regarding fees. The good news is that it’s not all bad this time — several fees have been killed. But banks are quietly calculating which other ones can take their place.
We’ll come right out and say it: Some consumers need a big bank. Maybe you travel a lot for work and need to bank at a place that has branches around the country. Or maybe you have a kid in college and want to be able to put money into an on-campus account or monitor spending. The question is, which big bank is right for you? For many people these days, the answer to that question comes down to fees.
A Facebook-led protest urged Americans to close their accounts at the nation’s biggest banks this Saturday, telling consumers “move your money” to a local bank or credit union. Just under 86,000 Facebook users had RSVP’ed to “attend” the weekend event. Did it work? It’s probably too soon to tell: trade associations for community banks and [...]
*What’s the asterisk for? Well, while several big banks say they won’t start charging monthly fees for debit cards a la Bank of America, in most cases they are adding other fees or changing account requirements to increase revenues anyway.
In the aftermath of Bank of America’s new $5 monthly debit card fee, politicians, consumer groups, and plain old angry consumers have denounced such fees as unfair and arbitrary, and pleaded with BofA and other financial institutions to get rid of them. But instead of asking these banks to reverse their decisions, perhaps it’s more [...]
