If posting Chase horror stories to twitter, use #boycottchase

Apparently the recommended hash tag for posting Chase horror stories to Twitter is #boycottchase.

Have you been treated poorly or been a victim of their incompetence at Chase Bank? Here is your platform to make comments. Tell us your horror stories. It will make everyone feel better. Promise! Vent it here.

Banks: It’s all about trust

As this Huffington Post article points out, we’ve lost trust in the big banks:

As Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and others scurry to figure out if their foreclosure processes are in fact legal, it’s clear we’ve reached a new low in terms of trust in America’s big banks.

I’ll take this a step further and say that we’ve really lost the trust that these banks that we have a business relationship will do the right thing.  In fact, we can trust that in most cases, when faced with a choice about whether to do the right thing, or the thing that makes them the most money, these banks will usually chose the thing that makes them the most money.

What is this site worth?

I had to laugh as I came upon the entry for our site on priceofweb.com.  What is our site worth?

chase-sucks.org estimated price worth is $1347

They’ve underestimated the traffic and grossly overestimated the revenue.  What they can’t calculate is how much this site is worth to JPMorgan Chase (or how much it costs them), which would be a much larger number, but probably much much smaller than all the money they make off of their poor treatment of customers.

The sad truth is that for JPMorgan Chase, bad customer service has so far been a winning strategy, financially at least, but they sure aren’t making any friends.  They only way to make the strategy of treating customers poorly, and charging them excessive fees, is for customers to raise a big stink whenever Chase behaves badly.  If enough people did this, it would no longer be profitable.

Ending your abusive relationship … WITH YOUR BANK!

Should “big” and “bank” be in your vocabulary together?

Bank of America (largest bank in the US) CEO Brian Moynihan, new on the job, shared his vision for the bank’s long term strategy on Tuesday.  Banks are being closely watched as they start to outline the ways in which they plan to recapture revenue that they are losing due to stricter regulation from the Credit Card Act of 2009, which has limited quite a few fees.

Some banks, like Chase, plan to get sneaky and use tricks to regain the lost income.  BofA showed some early indications that it might be heading down the straight and narrow path when it announced (in a splashy WSJ ad) it was doing away with its overdraft protection for debit cards entirely, having decided that it just wasn’t in the best interest of customers to continue the program.

So it was with some hope that I read about the new BofA CEO’s plans for the bank.

• The main focus is going to be making existing customers more profitable rather than seeking new customers.  They plan to do this by cross selling their various products to their existing customer base.  My concern is that this means customers can probably plan to be bombarded with mailings and harassed by bank staff constantly.  If they can pull this off without annoying people, perhaps getting different services from a single institution can be more efficient and cost effective for customers.
• BofA will focus on more modest and less volatile profits than before.  I read this to mean less focus on risky customers which likely means less focus on practices that make customers unreliable, like sudden and drastic interest rate increases, credit line decreases and punitive overdraft type fees.

But in general he completely missed the opportunity to talk about serving customers better.  After all, that is really what has changed over the last few decades with banks – they have gone from being institutions that were boring yet predictable in their financial results, and primarily focused on serving customers.  There is a huge need for one of  the large banks to lay claim to really serving customers, not just the lip service banks provide and then turn right around and screw you.  Only time will tell what type of bank BofA will be.

Granted, Brian Moynihan  was talking to investors, so perhaps it wasn’t the time and place to talk about the customer.  Still, I was disappointed and it made me wonder if there is really any use for big banks for people who want to be treated like a valued customer.

In response to protests, Chase backs off of MTR

In response to protests and shareholder resolutions, and mounting opposition from government agencies to support the practice, Chase has passed a public policy to limits their financial relationship with coal operators that practice mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR).

Dimon cuts house price further

Jamie Dimon first tried to sell his Chicago house a couple of years ago for $13.5 million.  It has yet to sell and the price has since dropped substantially, down to $9.5 million earlier this year.  Well now it has been reduced further, to $6.95 million.

Ouch.

But at least if it is a short sale, he’ll probably get Chase to approve it quickly. 🙂

chase-sucks.com makes second google page for “chase bank”

Many sites, including ours, have made it to the first Google results page for search terms like “chase sucks”, but to really spread the word about Chase’s horrible business practices, it is important to get high page ranking on more common search terms.

Chase Bank protest site chase-sucks.com (we are chase-sucks.org) has managed to make it to the second results page for the organic search term “chase bank”.

I am happy to announce that our site has pretty well dominated the searches for Chase’s leisure rewards credit cards, nabbing the first page second result for “leisure rewards” and first page third results for “chase leisure rewards”.