Don’t do anything to confuse Chase

Like change your address:

It was 2 weeks ago today that I called Chase Bank because they’d sent a Visa card to my old address. I was told I’d get the new card at my new address in 2 business days.

Ten business days later I had not received the new card, so I called again.

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Beyond inept

Reader Mike writes:

I had a Mileage Plus credit card administered by Chase. I was charged with a $60
renewal fee without my OK. I complained, and was sent a check for $60 several
months later. I didn’t cash it for several months, when I did so, it was returned.

When I called Chase I was told, “sorry we have no record of your account since it has
been closed.”

Now I get a letter saying if the check was lost, please fill in this form and
return it, or the property will go to the state. It says anything over $50 needs
to be notarized. What a joke. I am at the same address as when I was a cardholder
and was issued the check.

One of the reasons I quit Chase was the large number of unsolicited calls from
Chase’s “business partners” many of whom ignored the do not call list.

Hopefully Chase’s miserable business practices will be approved with
JP Morgan as the parent.

How can a company do business like this?  Seriously!

Chase 15 hour unplanned outage and cover-up

I received an email from a reader informing me of an unplanned outage of the Chase online banking last weekend and their attempt to cover it up by claiming that it was a planned maintenance outage.

Chase suffered a 15-hour outage of their online banking system last weekend. In response to inquiries about the incident, Chase is now attempting to cover up the importance of it by incredibly claiming that it was entirely maintenance activity that they planned in advance. Go here for more info:

http://boomzilla-boomzilla.blogspot.com/2010/08/chasecom-down-for-12-hours.html

I am duplicating the info below in case it disappears:

Going on now for at least 12 hours (point in time when I first tried the site — but could have been much longer), Chase accounts are unavailable. They keep a rudimentary web site up so they don’t get reported for being down – although to all intents and purposes they are down. Kinda rough if, like me, you signed up for their web-only account information and opted out of snail-mail communications (“to save money and be green”) – looks like I’ll be flipping that decison as soon as their site is back up for me to do so. Who takes as website offline for maintenance these days?

Update: August 9. Just received the following communication from Chase:

I am writing in response to your inquiry about not being
able to see your account information online.

Please be advised that we were experiencing technical
difficulties with our website. Our technicians have
corrected this issue and the website is now available
online. If you still face any difficulties, please call
our technical department on the number mentioned below.

I apologize for any trouble it may have caused to you.

If you have any further questions, please reply using the
Secure Message Center.

Thank You,

Vinay Shankar
E-mail Customer Service Representative

So Chase Customer Service says it was an unplanned outage; Chase Web-dev team say it was a planned outage. I asked them which one. I wonder if I’ll even get the courtesy of a response 😉

Chase trader loses $130 M on bad coal trade

Well isn’t this just precious.  Looks like the bloom is off the rose.  JP Morgan Chase, while they obviously are a huge retail bank, are an investment bank at their core and trading derivatives on their own account has made up a huge part of their income, especially the last year or so as they have access to easy money from the Fed.  But it looks as if they might want to pay a little more attention to their bastard stepchild retail banking arm when they start making big trading mistakes like this.

Coal-Trade Losses Sting J.P. Morgan

Loss of $130 million is setback for commodities business; bank expected to report healthy second-quarter profit

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. is expected to report a healthy second-quarter profit on Thursday. But one result the bank won’t likely talk about is its bad trade on coal.

Commodities trader Chan Bhima lost $130 million in revenue while wagering on a decline of European coal prices, according to people familiar with the matter. The trade was up in April. But a jump in coal prices later that month began to wipe out all gains, said one of these people. By mid-June, it had become one of the biggest losing positions at the bank’s commodities desk so far this year, this person added. It is expected that Mr. Bhima will leave the firm and has been working on a transition, said another person familiar with the matter.

J.P. Morgan and Mr. Bhima declined to comment.

The bad trade is a setback for J.P. Morgan’s fledgling commodities business, which still lags behind those of Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley, both of which have been in that business longer. The company began ramping up its investments in commodities several years ago, and its business grew with the acquisition of Bear Stearns Cos. Earlier this month, the bank completed its $1.6 billion purchase of assets from RBS Sempra Commodities which, only weeks before the transaction closed, was the victim of a heist of copper and nickel it stored for customers.

The coal-trading loss represents a small fraction of J.P. Morgan’s fixed-income revenue, which in the first quarter amounted to $5.4 billion as its investment bank posted a profit of $2.47 billion. But Mr. Bhima, who joined the bank last year to run J.P. Morgan’s global coal business, was part of the bank’s expansion of the company’s commodities operations. He previously worked for Merrill Lynch & Co., and brought other members of his team with him.

Mr. Bhima bet on a decline of European coal prices because of high coal inventories and slow economic growth there. He was shorting the contracts for delivery in 2010 and 2011, while hedging part of his position with bets prices would rise after that. The trade served him well in the first quarter—prices of coal were down 10% in Europe—helping net a revenue gain of about $50 million for the bank, said a person familiar with the trade.

By late-April, Mr. Bhima’s short positions on European coal were near $1 billion in notional contract prices, the people familiar with the trade said.

But the markets started to turn against them. In a move that surprised many, coal prices in Europe moved up in April despite the worries surrounding the sovereign-debt crisis there. By mid-June, the prices had rallied 31%, wiping out all the gains and flipping the trade into one of the commodities desk’s biggest losses.

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Chase gets worst grade at the BBB

Congratulations Chase Home Finance, you’ve earned an F, yes, that’s an F, at the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau.

Happy August everyone.  Make August find a better bank month.

Hello Chase, may I speak with the small-details department

Another (yet another) story about Chase not getting the small-details right.  These stories don’t seem to be limited to any one area of the products and services they offer.  This one happens to be about a mortgage tax and insurance escrow fund.

At first, the customers had their insurance and taxes paid into an escrow account with Chase, and Chase would take care of the taxes and insurance.  But the payments slowly grew over time until the homeowners called them to ask what’s up.  What was up was that Chase incorrectly collected $4,000 more than it needed to.  So the homeowners decided to opt-out of the escrow account.

The problem is, Chase keeps sending them nasty letters (third time now in 3 years) about overdue escrow account payments, for, of all things, their neighbors water bill.  The fixed the problem once, and it happened again.  They fixed the problem a second time, and Chase is now doing it for the third time.

No used-to-be-a-different-bank excuses here; the loan was originated through Chase.

Chase to handle utility company receivables; what could possible go wrong?

This scenario has disaster spelled all over it.  Not a day goes by that I don’t see a story that exemplifies that Chase just isn’t good had the small details related to their core business – banking.

Now, the city of Casa Grande in Arizona has contracted Chase to receive and process all incoming utility payment checks, and they will then transmit the payment data to the city electronically.

I wonder if they will automatically debit from utility payments anyone that happens to have an outstanding debit with Chase?

WaMu-Chase account conversion creates yet another security hole

A new twist on a problem Chase has had converting accounts from WaMu over to Chase.  We previously reported on a woman whose account was combined with that of her ex-boyfriend of a decade prior when it was converted over to Chase; she had a very hard time getting the problem corrected.

This story involves a business account where an ex-partner was previously removed from the account but the transition to Chase added him back such that the ex-partners email become the primary email contact for the account.  Following Chase’s advice to the letter didn’t solve the problem and as of yet, Chase has been unable to fix it, while sensitive personal and business information continues to be emailed to the ex-partner.

I’ve said it before and I’ll scream it again; Chase doesn’t seem to be very good at the small details.

A few years ago I had a business account with an old business partner. This account was with WaMu and came through to Chase along with my personal accounts. Though the partner left the company a couple years ago and was removed from the account his information was apparently migrated from WaMu to Chase.

I setup one of Chase’s online features – account alerts. I get a daily summary of account activity every morning and alerts when certain things happen. Things like purchases, transfers or deposits over thresholds I set.

A few months ago I logged into the Chase online account manager and noticed on the home page the e-mail address of the old business partner was listed as the primary e-mail address for my accounts. I reported this to Chase online customer service. They sent me instructions on how to change it; which I did right away. Problem solved, right? Wrong.

About 5 weeks later the e-mail address came back. I changed it again. A few weeks later it came back. Now you understand why I am spending my time writing about this.

I called Chase online and they gave me some additional steps (disable your alerts, change the e-mail, setup my alerts again). The problem continued.

I got my branch involved. They had me change it at the branch on their computer. Still not fixed. Then it got worse.

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