turn back while you still can

Thanks for the read looks really interesting. 10% is still pretty high I would think. I mean if they really wanted to weed out the churners they could. Our Chex and EWS reports are very very different from a normal person’s, so the churner problem could easily be solved just by denying us accounts, esp accounts with promotions. The terms could be so much simpler and laxed for the normal person then.

but then again “half a trillion dollars in deposits”… they might just not care about the peasants’ crumbs. This is why its so much harder probably to get accounts at smaller banks, because they actually do the sane thing and just deny us from the beginning. I “figuratively” walk up to the bank with my money bags open and they just lock the doors.

Yeah that’s not going to happen. Like my buddy RJ says “That’s just the cost of the game sometimes”.

SoFi, no. Portals, YMMV.

No. They have until the end of this month.

I’ve dropped an article from SouthState the talks about the economics of offering bonuses a few times. The churn percentage is a lot lower than a lot of people here assume, only ~10-13%. #2296943

I agree that it’s possible that there may be a bit of that “unspoken agreement” going on, but that math is a bit over my head this morning. It’s equally plausible you are underestimating though. USB has ~half a trillion dollars in deposits lol.

https://www.usbanklocations.com/u-s-bank.shtml

Similar timeline here.

Of course. But different business entities.

Good points. That is why I was thinking when a major bank starts making these term changes, and others start following, we may get a sudden wave of banks making the same changes in a short period of time. Because these banks can still get an advantage over another bank with far less cost. So then everything kind of settles at a new baseline (ie. one bonus per business signer becomes the norm, or 24 month limits). Any bank that wants to allow multiple bonuses per signer has a huge advantage, but probably way more of an advantage than necessary to win someone over.

I do agree, that if the goal of the bank is to steal a customer from another bank, then lifetime limits are bad, since maybe after a few years a customer may be willing to change banks and that balances out the promo cost, but these 12 month limits just seem ridiculous in practicality. Who would change banks, close the account, and then come back to the same bank within 12 months, is that really normal behavior, and why would a bank be willing to pay for that sort of customer. But like you said, maybe banks are just doing it because other banks are doing it.

I would be very curious what percentage of the promo payouts are to churners vs non churners. I have kept some genuinely good banks from promotions, so even the churners can be kept on as customers, but US Bank giving out $1500 x3 or x4 to one person every year or so, is obviously something they could identify and probably limit haha. I mean look at Chime, like do they not realize what is going on.

Maybe there is this unspoken agreement between banks and churners. We get paid to game the system and the banks get inflated stats they can feed to their board or investors or whatever. Everyone wins and the bank can play naïve to it. “We didn’t know 20% 5% (but still) of our new accounts were the same people we were paying money to do it over and over.”

I may be underestimating how much money these banks have and how the churner effect may not even cause a noticeable blip on some of their sheets.

Yes. Refer Live links are known to stack with very few exceptions.

@williamcharles

If I remember correctly, I just used one that was linked in the older comments here. Not sure if they’re still valid now, but it worked at the time.