Online Banking

Sometimes we don't appreciate what we have until we explore our options. This would certainly be the case with my recent experiences with PNC Bank.

I initially came into the world of online banking with Washington Mutual. While regularly readers will know that we've faced a myriad of issues with WaMu's Home Loans, I had a relatively excellent experience when looking strictly at online banking.

I was stubborn and kept my WaMu account for my first couple of years in DC, holding on to a piece of the Pacific Northwest. I finally converted after looking at all the options in DC very carefully: Chevy Chase, Bank of America, Riggs. I ended up going with Riggs since James was already on their accounts and the whole point was to simplify. I switched over and nearly fell over with how completely inept their online banking was. I couldn't hack it for more than a couple of months and ended up switching everything back to WaMu again. The lesser of evils at the time.

When ING came out with their Orange Electric Checking I jumped at the opportunity and love nearly everything about their online banking. Oh let me count the ways...

Anyway, Riggs was converted a couple of years ago to PNC. Just as I was moving to Afghanistan I went in to close an account under my old name, one of the last hold outs, and got lured in. They had several account perks because of my employer, including no international transaction fees. I asked about the online banking, telling them that I hate hated the Riggs platform, and they had assured me of how excellent PNC's was. Considering that this would be a gain of 1% international transaction fee on all of my overseas spending, and that James still keeps his accounts there, I thought it would be worth having an account there. I also figured that giving James an account with a local branch might make it easier for him to help with managing my accounts.

Since then it has been nothing but a headache. I've been charged international bank fees, as I was not supposed to, and I even got charged to have a wire from my employer deposited. The whole point was that they were giving me special perks because of my employer.

Anyway, I was finally fed up with it all a couple of months ago and decided to start shutting down my account. I canceled the automatic deposit I had going into the account from my employer, and that went well enough.

Then I tried to cancel my automatic payments that had been going to our second mortgage. I canceled the online payment and it worked for one payment and then came back another two weeks later. I canceled it again, and the same. Finally I canceled the whole bill pay system, and it still deducted again - this time causing an over draft. It failed to tell me that a check had already been cut the day before I canceled everything (even though it didn't show that the payment was going out until another week), and thus the payment went through even though everything was canceled from every indication online.

I had to call six times today, with dropped calls and all, to sort out the issue. Now this means that I have to wait for a payment to come over from ING before I can close out the account. Additionally this has meant that $1,600 has gone towards our first mortgage when we would have rather had it goes towards our goal of paying off the second.

I will be so happy to say goodbye to PNC for good.

Lessons of the day: If you have a system that works. Stay with it. If you have a system that doesn't work, demand more. Lastly, simplification is your friend.

Miel