Chase’s latest arbitrary rule – the day ends when we say it does
Chase is nothing if not creative. Their latest bit of creativity that is aimed at increasing fees is to say that a payment is due at the end of business hours on the due date rather than the actual end of the day. Furthermore the end of the business day is in their time zone (EST) not the one that you are in. With electronic payments these days, the end of business hours is not the end of the ability to make a payment, so business hours shouldn’t be important.
I suspect that some bean counter at Chase figured out that quite a few payments were technically on time according to their old rules but could be considered late if they just changed their rules a little bit.
Bad bad Chase, Fees & charges | admin May 23, 2010
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By coakl, January 11, 2011 @ 11:06 am
You have to set a deadline at some point. There isn’t a processing center for each time zone in the world. You have to pick a fixed time for everyone. That gives the old mainframe computers behind all of the pretty websites, debit cards, and mobile access, a starting point for that night’s processing. You have to start early enough so, that if something bad happens, you have enough time to do disaster recovery.
With that said, Chase could be more generous as to their cut-off times.
Credit card payments through online banking must be done by 5 pm EST in order to count for that calendar day. Online banking bill pay and transfers between checking and savings must be done by 11 pm EST. Loan payments via online banking must be done by 7:30 pm EST.
As you can see, these deadlines really stink if you are a former WaMu customer in CA, OR, WA, AZ, NV, ID. WaMu’s cut-off time was 11 pm Pacific, which really helped out east coast WaMu customers. Now, the shoe is on the other foot.