Found this recently in response to a post about Chase:
Had an acct with chase and they even put a 4 day hold on payroll and a state tax checks. i totally stopped banking there after they sent my elec bill back even though i had the money there. they admitted their mistake, but only covered the fee for that check there was 2 other small checks their fee caused to bounce and they wouldnt fix it. so i closed my acct there, ive dealt with numerous banks and by far they are the worst.
So let me get this straight, Chase bounces a check they shouldn’t have, and the customer gets assessed a fee. That fee drags the account negative so that two two other small checks bounce and he is assessed two more fees. Chase admits their mistake and refunds the first fee but refuses to refund the other fees even though it is clearly their fault.
Perhaps I have just seen so many stories like this about Chase that I am not outraged or even surprised. Yes, Chase does stuff like this all the time.
Chase is pushing their Chase Leisure Rewards for your debit card which runs $25/year. When one customer signed up the teller convinced him that he would be getting hundreds of dollars back per year, making it well worth it. So he started using his debit card for everything expecting big rewards. After three months, his rewards added up to a sum total of four dollars.
You might want to avoid this “deal”.
Is this Chase’s new way to force people into signing up for services they don’t need?
This customer went to a Chase branch to complain about an incorrectly levied service charge and was bombarded by offers of every kind. At one point, the teller told him that they would waive the fee if they could show him how to use online bill payment.
His other observation was that the fact that Chase employees were bombarding customers with a ton of offers in the branch made the wait time longer for those in line.
Nice work Chase.
Sometimes you just have to stand back from all the negative news about Chase and laugh. It is really quite hilarious what they do at times.
Like this latest letter Chase’s Paymentech subsidiary sent to customers, under the guise of being even more transparent with its customers about its merchant processing fees. Even one recipient of the letter, a lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against Visa and MasterCard, can’t understand what they are trying to say.
That BankSimple concept we wrote about a few days ago is looking better and better.
Tippecanoe County in Indiana decided to dump Chase for a smaller local bank because they receive higher interest at the smaller bank.
Hmm.
Ok, I am heavily paraphrasing with that title, but if you read Consumer Reports article entitled When to bail on your bank, the only conclusion your can come to is that big banks suck and small banks rule. Specifically, they find in big banks favor for:
- More branches
- Better online and mobile banking
But, small banks outshine big ones in many more ways:
- Better service
- Closer community ties
- Better credit cards – much lower rates, lower late fees and over-limit fees
- Higher yields on savings accounts
- Low-rate loans
Update 6/5/10: The Wall Street Journal seems to agree.
Celent, a Boston-area banking industry research and consulting firm said specifically that banks should tell their unprofitable customers “Bye bye! Please take your business to a bank that doesn’t have a handle on customer profitability”
Chase has apparently been listening because the rest of the excerpts from Celent’s suggestions to banks could have been taken out of a Chase playbook.
The problem is, people are rarely static. Today’s unprofitable customer is potentially tomorrow’s highly successful customer and a slash-and-burn policy like Chase has is borrowing for today’s increased profits from tomorrow’s growth prospects. In other words, they are pissing a lot of people off.
As an example, my partner and I bought our current manufacturing company 8 years ago. The first four years were a work in progress and we kept having to pump more money into the company. The last four years however have been increasingly profitable, despite the recession. Had our bank dumped us early on because we didn’t fit their idea of what a good customer was then, they would have missed out on the fact that we are one of the increasingly fewer ideal borrowers today and we would have gotten our recent large loan to acquire another business from someone else.
Don’t be so short-sighted Chase.
Our good friends Chase made the news again today in an article in the Wall Street Journal on the creative ways credit card issuers are finding to skirt the Credit Card Reform Act of 2009.
Chase in particular is highlighted for their use raising of minimum payments as leverage to force people with very low locked-in promotional rates (like from a balance transfer promotion) to agree to higher interest rates.
Bad bad Chase, Fees & charges | admin June 12, 2010 | 
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