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Well, let's face it -- it's not like banks actually make money any other way out of checking accounts. Any bank account with less than... I dunno, $50K in it...
by hugh3 15y ago
Well, let's face it -- it's not like banks actually make money any other way out of checking accounts. Any bank account with less than... I dunno, $50K in it... is probably costing the bank far more than it's worth. The bank ain't a charity.
- fennecfoxen 15y agoI don't think it's how much the account has in it, these days, half so much as the amount of payments they put on their check card. Cash flow and merchant fees are where it's at.
- pyre 15y agoThere are more honorable ways to make money than to label something as 'free' and then attempt to incorporate as many hidden fees as possible.
- minikomi 15y agoBah! It's not like anyone would ever fall for that. Sent from my iPhone
- johngalt 15y agoTrue which is precisely why banks used to charge a small monthly fee to have an account. Then one bank offered "free checking" and all the rest had to follow suit or lose all their DDAs. There are evil banks out there, and customers flock to them. Frankly if you were looking for dishonorable behavior there is much worse going on at banks. For instance its widely known that a certain bank will report its current customers to chexsystems for the slightest infraction (a few overdrafts, or a returned deposit). Effectively this makes the customer unable to open an account at a competitor. So they remain stuck with bank of scam-erica.
- nknight 15y agoYeah, tell me, how much are those electrons costing the bank, again? Unless they're also giving you free checks, that's pretty much the cost. A human being will rarely look at anything. Everything is handled by automated computer systems.
- notJim 15y agoI think you're missing out on a lot of things. The bank definitely has costs that go into supporting its customers: branches and employees to staff them (most banks, not all of course), phone support people, the very computer systems you talk about, and people to keep them running and add new features to them. Most mainstream banks' free checking accounts make these things available to account holders, so I don't know how you can say they don't cost anything.
- nknight 15y agoI haven't set foot in a bank branch in over a year, and then only to deal with a problem caused by the confluence of their antiquated model and that of another company. I've never once made a phone call to, or received one from, my current bank in the ~7 years my current checking account has been open. I don't know who you think they're maintaining such anachronisms for, but it ain't this free checking user. The computer systems have to be created and maintained for their wealthy depositors regardless. The marginal cost of adding less affluent customers is laughable, and more than paid for by the interest they can earn from a few hundred dollars in deposits.
- enjo 15y agoNext time you walk by a bank branch, take note of how many people are inside. That would likely indicate that your something of a anomaly.
- nknight 15y agoUm, zero? That was pretty much the case whenever I went in to a bank branch in past years. Often I was the only one there, never was the employee to customer ratio less than 5:1, and anyone who was there was most likely to be 60+. A visit to a physical bank branch is the anomaly today, not a lack thereof.
- notJim 15y agoThe thing that matters is that those are available to you. The bank does some modeling on how much use all of those facilities will get, and plans accordingly. You figure into that planning whether you go or not. I don't know the stats on how many free checking users use bank branches, but we both know it's more than zero. Same with phone service. As far as the computer systems, those scale with number of accounts, not number of dollars. Given that the majority of accounts are likely to be free, or low net-worth accounts, it stands to reason that free checking customers make up a significant portion of the cost of operating these systems.