We officially left Bank of America today. We’ve had our checking accounts moved over to USAA for two months now to give us time to weed out any issues or recurring ACH payments we might have.
Why USAA? We live virtually, meaning if there’s a way to do something online, we’ll do it. USAA has free checking, with free checks, free debit transactions, and free ATM withdrawals(a). I can deposit a check into my account just by taking a picture of it with my phone. It’s easy to get a CSR on the phone(b). They don’t have branches, but if I need to make an in-person deposit and not do the smartphone picture deposit thing, then I can go to the UPS Store here in Celebration and make my deposit there. If I need an official check, I can order it online and they’ll mail it to me. In a nutshell, I can do all my banking without leaving the house, which is how it should be in the year 2011.
Why not Bank of America? For the most part, I never really paid too much attention to banks. For what we do, I thought a bank is a bank is a bank. Then BOA announced a few months ago that they were instituting a service charge for debit card users, a response to their fees being capped by the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law. I’m not a debit card person — I use my credit card anywhere and everywhere(c) — so the new fee wouldn’t have affected me. But the announcement did get me thinking. BOA is still profiting from each and every one of their debit card transactions, they’re just now making less. Again, it’s not that BOA is now taking a bath on debit cards, it’s that they’re now only making $x a year in profits as opposed to $x * 2.
It’s not that there was one event that caused me to spend time moving my accounts somewhere else(d). It was a slow build-up, death-by-a-thousand-cuts… a 10 minute wait in a phone queue, a crashed web site, long lines at the branch. They’re probably too big for their own good. Scale is good up to a point, but you reach a certain size where you’re receiving the optimal benefit from that size, and once you exceed that size, stuff starts slipping through the cracks. An organization gets so large they get bogged down in bureaucracy and internal politics, and they can’t affect the changes that keep them responsive to their customers and competitive with respect to rates and products.
The USAA web site is not as friendly as Bank of America’s, but overall I’m happy with the move so far. Time will tell if it stays that way.
(a) – Up to 15 a month.
(b) – To close my accounts, I first tried calling BOA this morning at their 800 number for checking and savings accounts. There was no option for Close Account on their phone tree. When I pushed the option to speak to an agent, it told me the call center was currently closed. The call center opened at 7am; this was at 8:30am.
(c) – And religiously pay it off every month.
(d) – And it does take time. I probably spent 3 or 4 non-contiguous hours making the move. That’s time opening accounts, canceling and re-adding ACH links, ordering checks, setting up smartphone deposit capability, and other stuff.