Banking Fees, The Ridiculousness Thereof

[cpirate]

A few days ago I ran across an interesting story from Britain about bank customers and consumers rights groups getting mad about some rather obnoxious banking charges. We get that here in Canada, that's fairly normal, though the banks' rationalizations are pretty spectacular here ("it's not a penalty charge, it's a fee for a service. That you can

Comments

[wlach]

Are overdraft charges (the actual subject of that article) that ridiculous here in Canada? I've always been careful to keep an adequate balance in my chequing account to cover expenses, so I wouldn't know.

Perhaps I'm weird, but I feel like my monthly banking fee is pretty reasonable given the level of service I get. If I felt differently, I could always move to one of the no-fee alternatives (e.g. PC Financial and/or ING direct).

[cpirate]

I don't know first-hand. People on the receiving ends of NSF cheques will ding you for service fees, but in that case they have a somewhat legitimate complaint for having to deal with extra costs. Whereas a bounced cheque doesn't really create any extra work for the bank.

It just strikes me that back when service fees started appearing at banks, people grumbled an awful lot, but didn't actually do anything. Likewise when savings accounts at the regular banks became useless. I'm just wondering what it would take for Canadians to actually get riled up enough to do something.