Personal Finance

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Capital One banking is another move toward the robotic, impersonal banking that corporations love and people love to hate. I’m not necessarily going to wax poetic about “the way things used to be”, “Blahblahblahblah Bank was better”, “I used to walk 10 miles to school uphill in a snow squall when I was a kid”, yadayadayada. I will say this, though, that I’ve had FAR better experiences with banking when banks were smaller,even when those banks were kinda rusty in the current world of online banking services.

I’ll be concise: my original bank - in the current history of me (1993-now) - was called Bayside Federal Savings. Hometown kinda bank in a neighborhood full of whiners and complainers. Their customer service rose to the occasion and was top shelf all the way.

North Fork Bank acquired that branch and (IIRC) dissolved that institution altogether. Many of the same employees migrated to tthe NFB “family” and most all was well in Dodge.

When NFB was acquired by Capital One, several things changed. First, they told the soon-to-be-CapOne employees “Here is how we do things, here are the hours we operate, here’s our pay/pay raise structure and if you don’t like it, don’t let the door hit you in the low riders on the way out”. (This was told to me by several current and former employees who I’d been on a first name basis with for the better part of 13-, 14 years.) Second, their stringent policies about “commonplace” banking issues like overdrafts/NSFs, etc are cut in stone and even the bank managers are powerless to affect, e.g., I bounced a check about 8 years ago and the at-that-time bank manager waived the fee no questions asked (I’ve bounced 2 checks in 15 years and blame no one but myself). By contrast, I asked to put a payroll check in as cash (a “no hold” in bankspeak) and the manager flatly refused saying that all checks need to “clear by normal schedules”. When I explained that I have a 25 year relationship with this employer, she gave me a blank stare as if I had said that in Esperanto.

OK, so dealing with automatons may not be all that uncommon in some commercial situations nowadays but here are a some of my main, unresolveable complaints that Cap One has no intent of addressing.

1: their online banking interface is sparse and unintuitive. It also lacks a check-register-like running balance per transaction (a la every other bank on the planet).

2: I’ve made several transactions from ANOTHER Cap One branch and they showed up 2-3 banking days later. Transactions made at “my” branch show up within moments. NOTE: I said “my” in quotes because an acct rep at the other branch said all Cap One branches handle transactions equally; ergo, there was no need to make that branch “my” branch. Apparently, this is not true.

3: There is little to no interface between Capital One’s credit card unit and their banking units. Other banks (Chase for one) actually link their checking, savings, commercial and CC accounts under a single banner and you can interactively make transactions between with a single login. Cap One’s CC and banking are seperate entities requiring more than one login to make transactions. Stupid and archaic.

4: Their 24 hours, toll-free customer service has little value other than to ask if “there’s anything else I can help you with today?”.

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