As an exercise, I searched Yelp for Chase in New York City, added up the total number of stars they got and divided by the number of reviews. Chase’s total score for New York city is 2.21 out of 5 stars.
I did the same for the bank I use, First Republic, for New York City. Admittedly, there are far fewer reviews. They scored a 4.67 out of 5 stars. In San Francisco, where First Republic has far more reviews, they still stored about the same on average.
Unlike some of the West Coast cities where Chase is unpopular due to their takeover of WaMu (and many subsequent snafus) Chase has been in NYC for a very long time. They should have gotten it right by now.
From comlaintsboard.com:
Chase froze my husband’s account because of an identity theft alert on his account. Chase never called or alerted my husband about the status of his account. The bank refused to allow him to make a deposit or cash any government checks. Which is apparently against the law in this situation. The bank required for him to prove his identity with social security which he did but the account remained frozen. The bank, however, continued to charge fees for all of the electronic transactions that were preset with online banking. They also considered allowing an electronic debit for 999, 999, 999.00. Over a week has gone by and they remain determined to collect the nsf fees that they tacked on from all of this mess before they will even consider to open a new account. Their policies don’t make sense. The customer service is appalling and I would never trust or recommend any business affiliated with Chase.
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.
This is so stupid of Chase I am laughing out loud. A Chase customer set up automatic payments for their car loan, but when the car loan was fully paid off, they found it impossible to cancel the automatic payments. The Chase employee they spoke to said the only way to cancel an automatic payment is to pay the stop payment fee, presumably for every single future payment as they go on indefinitely.
King County, home of the former Washington Mutual headquarters is striking out at JP Morgan Chase and demanding back taxes on the art collection it inherited from its Washington Mutual acquisition. JP Morgan Chase has claimed it has no art in King County despite the fact that it actually seems to. Appreciation in the value of art owned by companies must be reported and is taxes, unlike that for individuals.
The judge in the Washington Mutual bankruptcy ordered WaMu’s former holding company to talk with shareholders about their request for documents to investigate the seizure of Washington Mutual in 2008.
The parties are set to report back to the bankruptcy judge on June 17th.
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.
Customer service | admin June 6, 2010 | 
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