Author Topic: Interesting Letter Sent To Bank of America  (Read 1301 times)

Offline Bodhi

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Interesting Letter Sent To Bank of America
« on: May 29, 2003, 07:11:48 AM »
Sent to:

Kenneth Lewis
Chairman and CEO, Bank of America
Bank of AMerica Corporate Center
100 North Tryon Street
Charlotte, NC 28255

Dear Mr. Lewis

I was livid when my employees informed me that as of today, they were being charged $5.00 by your (and my) bank to cash their weekly paychecks if they did not have an account with your (no longer my) bank. I called the branch where I have had a business account for over 12 years and that was confirmed as the new corporate policy. I also called two other national banks and that is not their policy - they honor checks written on their banks without penalizing the person attempting to cash them.

I realise I am a peanut and you are one of the elephants in the grand scheme of our world. However, I will not be party to feeding the elephants.  In that regard, I will be opening a business account with one of your compeititors on Monday, will be a past customer within 30 days.

Sincerely,

Name witheld for privacy



Bank of America's Reply


Dear Mr. Name witheld for privacy

Thank you for thaking the time to write and for allowing me the oppurtunity to research and respond to your letter to Mr. Kenneth D. Lewis, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America.  Mr. Lewis has asked the Executive Relations Office to research and respond to you regarding your employees being charged a five dollar service fee for cashing their payroll checks.

Our customers have told us they don't like to wait in long lines in our banking centers. Non-customer check cashing contributes to significant traffic volume in our banking centers.  We believe the $5.00 convienience fee may help reduce lobby traffic thereby giving our tellers more time to better serve our account holders.

Bank of America has a contract with its business account holders to provide certain products and services.  THis contract is not extended to the employess of the account holder.  There is no fee to deposit a check drawn on Bank of America into your present checking account. Anyone interested in opening up an account with us will be surprised to learn that we offer a wide variety of accounts to meet the needs of all customers.

Thank you for the oppurtunity to share our position regarding this issue.  If you have any additional questions, please feel free to contact me at ###-###-####.

Sincerely,

Name withheld for privacy (Not the CEO)
Executive Relations
I regret doing business with TD Computer Systems.

Offline Nash

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Interesting Letter Sent To Bank of America
« Reply #1 on: May 29, 2003, 07:17:05 AM »
What's interesting here? The policy seems okay to me...:confused:

Offline Curval

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Interesting Letter Sent To Bank of America
« Reply #2 on: May 29, 2003, 07:21:21 AM »
Hate to say it, but in this case the bank is right in charging its "non-account holding" cheque cashers a fee.

They are wrong in stating that the excuse is to shorten lines for their customers though.

Fact is it costs the bank time and money to cash cheques drawn on another bank.

Banking is a business, like any other.  People seem to think that banking is some sort of right.
Some will fall in love with life and drink it from a fountain that is pouring like an avalanche coming down the mountain

Offline Bodhi

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Interesting Letter Sent To Bank of America
« Reply #3 on: May 29, 2003, 07:26:20 AM »
Personally the policy does not affect me, my checks are deposited into my account, and if they are drawn through another bank, they go through it.  WHat is interesting is that BoA is charging the customers customers for cashing his checks.  Thats the sad thing of it.  They may be a business, but they have no customer service.  As for the excuse of having to cover costs to cash their checks... I say BS, that is a poor excuse, their customer wrote the funds out of their bank, and they should have the decncy to honor them in person, without an added fee.  They are already making money hand over fist, no need to gouge people's eyes out.
I regret doing business with TD Computer Systems.

Offline Fatty

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Interesting Letter Sent To Bank of America
« Reply #4 on: May 29, 2003, 07:26:44 AM »
Think you misread it Curval, the checks are drawn from them, not another bank.

Offline Curval

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Interesting Letter Sent To Bank of America
« Reply #5 on: May 29, 2003, 07:45:54 AM »
Original letter:
"they were being charged $5.00 by your (and my) bank to cash their weekly paychecks if they did not have an account with your (no longer my) bank."

Reply:
"THis contract is not extended to the employess of the account holder"

The cheques are drawn on Bank of America...but you need to have an account there to be able to cash cheques without a $5 fee.

I did misread....

This is silly.  The bank can check if there are availiable funds very quickly so there is no issue with "clearing" the cheques.

Cash grab on behalf of the bank.
Some will fall in love with life and drink it from a fountain that is pouring like an avalanche coming down the mountain

Offline Nash

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Interesting Letter Sent To Bank of America
« Reply #6 on: May 29, 2003, 08:16:00 AM »
I guess it is a bit much... How many employees are we talking about anyway?

Offline T0J0

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Interesting Letter Sent To Bank of America
« Reply #7 on: May 29, 2003, 08:47:18 AM »
Whats the problem?!

Offline OIO

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Interesting Letter Sent To Bank of America
« Reply #8 on: May 29, 2003, 08:49:12 AM »
Bank of America is the biggest POS bank ive ever had the misfortune to experience.

They never sent my statements in time, when they sent them at all in the first place (I have 6 months total of missing statements, they were never mailed to me, see below).

I began by going to the bank's local branch to check if they had my address right or if there was any problem mailing my statements... they said it was fine that it must be the mail that was having problems (uh-huh). And this went on throught the 2 years i was with that bank.

Then with my checking and savings account they would "lose" my money for a WEEK at a time when i x-fered from checking to savings. Again, talking with the branch manager they said they had no clue what was going on, but that they would be more than willing to "backtrack" the issue and find a resolution... for a $40 fee. I was like WTF????????????

Credit cards... 1 month before I cancelled my account completely I began cancelling my credit cards with them (had 2). They were all paid off in full (had been paid off for 2 months already)... first CC I went to cancel turns out they could NOT cancel it because there was some kind of fee still unpaid. WTF? I showed them their own statement (which I had them print a copy of in their office, 'cause I sure as heck was not receving the statements anymore) and it clearly showed ZERO balance and no fees. Stil they said there was a $10 fee for CANCELLING the card. WTF???? I looked over my C.C. legalese 2-page folder of terms and conditions and never found any mention of it.. and they did not care to point out where it was.

Having enough, I found a local credit union, set up my account with them and went to BOA and cancelled the whole account, got all my money in a cashier's check, took 2 photocopies of it and of the bank statement before I took the money out.

3 months later I received a statement from BOA saying I was owing them like 2 dollars for account maintainance. I took my paperwork to the local branch, and asked to speak directly with the head honcho. Took me 2 hours with the moron in charge, who kept saying there would be a fee for getting it all resolved, that he was sorry (*groan*) but that they still needed to squeeze my pockets to fix their fuggin mistakes.

Left, went to credit union, asked the local manager there what her thoughts were on this mess, showed her the paperwork I had. She made a couple of calls and got it straightened out.

"We get this all the time from B.O.A." was all she said.

The C.U. has been just awesome since then. I took one of their C.C's, been using it for a year now, its got the same 14% apr of my deceased BOA CC's.. and last week I got a call from the lady in the loan dept of my local branch (which i worked with to refinance my car and open my C.C. with the C.U.), she told me that I could now change my CC from the 14% to a 10.45% apr card.

You cant beat service like that!

BOA can put my dirty shirts in a pot of water, boil them and sip the broth. :D :D

Offline gofaster

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Interesting Letter Sent To Bank of America
« Reply #9 on: May 29, 2003, 09:02:31 AM »
When I was a kid my mom tried to teach me all about saving my weekly allowance and using a bank.  So we opened up an account at a local bank.  My hard-earned allowances savings went to a zero balance in the bank's monthly fees within 2 months.  Yeah, I learned a lot about banking.

When I became an adult and started on my career path, I joined a credit union.

Offline Dingbat

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Interesting Letter Sent To Bank of America
« Reply #10 on: May 29, 2003, 09:50:29 AM »
Bank Of America has been great to me, better than any others.  If your company doesn't have Direct Deposit in this day and age you're working for turds.  My CC, Mortgage, Checking, Savings are all with them and I can transfer at any time to anyone of them.  Besides the fact this issue is well over a year old.  And if you go here Linkage   you'll see they aren't the only one.

Offline capt. apathy

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Interesting Letter Sent To Bank of America
« Reply #11 on: May 29, 2003, 09:56:54 AM »
several years ago we had a similar problem (I think it was a wells Fargo bank but I'm not 100% sure) nobody at the bank or the company I was working for seemed to interested in fixing the problem.

I simply brought my union steward with me to talk to the paymaster and explained that the bank he was using was charging us $6 per check to cash them.  do to this fee my checks where in fact $6 light (as they where only being honored for $6 less than face value) and that I expected to be reimbursed for the 4 checks I already cashed and that in the future he could make the checks out for an additional $6 each or pay me in cash in the future (and would file a complaint through the union that I would easily win if he didn't comply).  I also told him I would be letting everybody else know what I was doing and would suggest that they do the same.

 with the several hundred guys on our project alone, and many more projects across the world this added up to quite an expense to the company. and with the amount of money they had in their accounts they had no problem straightening out the bank.

of course they just made an exception for our company (show your id badge) they still kept screwing over everyone else.
« Last Edit: May 29, 2003, 09:59:19 AM by capt. apathy »

Offline Curval

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Interesting Letter Sent To Bank of America
« Reply #12 on: May 29, 2003, 10:16:49 AM »
Quote
Originally posted by gofaster
When I was a kid my mom tried to teach me all about saving my weekly allowance and using a bank.  So we opened up an account at a local bank.  My hard-earned allowances savings went to a zero balance in the bank's monthly fees within 2 months.  Yeah, I learned a lot about banking.


LOL...so so true.

I had a similar situation whereby I had been given a small block of BANK shares as a present by some relative for my birthday.  The dividends went into an account that I set up just to receive them.

Every month statements would show up and I never looked at them.  It wasn't until the bank called and were demanding that I cover an overdraft in that account due to the bank charges that had caused it to be overdrawn that I realised how I had been "had".

I then changed my dividends so that they would simply be automatically re-invested in shares.

It was a good lesson, fortunately learned early in life.
Some will fall in love with life and drink it from a fountain that is pouring like an avalanche coming down the mountain

Offline LePaul

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Interesting Letter Sent To Bank of America
« Reply #13 on: May 29, 2003, 11:38:44 AM »
So they charge $5 to clear the lobby.....and have less business?

Wow.  Sounds like a new Category for Darwin to expand to.

Only bad bank I've encountered is Key Bank.  Eh gad, numb!

Credit Union ever since!

Offline john9001

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Interesting Letter Sent To Bank of America
« Reply #14 on: May 29, 2003, 12:09:43 PM »
interesting, so people still "cash" checks and carry around paper money?
i use direct deposit and buy with a debit card, i carry very little "cash".
i also pay bills like elect, phone,etc over the internet and have 24/7 access to my bank account on the net.