I've been banking with Netbank for almost five years. I opened the account when I was a college student because it was free, the online banking features were attractive, and because the account was interest-bearing.
I'll be the first to admit that as a young woman I've bounced a few checks and have had my account overdrawn quite a few times. Such things happen occasionally when you live paycheck to paycheck— you can't get around it, so you accept the responsibility and pay the fees.
The problem I have had with Netbank is that when a situation arises that occurs due to no fault of the customer.
On two seperate occasions Netbank has flat-out refused to reimburse me for fees accessed to my account that were brought on by the errors of other institutions. I had made a deposit and Netbank cleared it—funds showed in both the "current" and "available" balance.
Several days later Netbank reversed the deposit and sent me a letter stating that they believed the item would not be paid. It turned out that the check I deposited was from an account which the OTHER bank had made clerical errors on—thus the reversal. Several items bounced or were returned as a result. Of course I was spending money—it had cleared! I explained long and hard that the situation was of no fault of my own OR the person who wrote me the check. At one point I was told to request a "courtesy fee refund" from the OTHER bank involved in the transaction. Needless to say I never got reimbursed by either side as I don't have an account with the other bank.
The straw breaking the camel's back is working right now. I mailed in a deposit from my new local bank account last week (sick of mailing in deposits and. I was concerned that my mailbox had been tampered with and that the deposit had been stolen before the carrier could collect it. I decided to wait a sufficient amount of time to see if the deposit made it to Netbank.
On Tuesday when it had not cleared, I sent a Bank Mail to query whether it had been received and got no response. I expressed that I was concerned about outstanding checks written against the accounts that were depending on the deposit and just wanted to know if I should persue the post office.
Today, I received a noticed in the mail stating that Netbank would not accept my deposit and that they were "sorry for any inconvenience." They're sorry all right! They get to rack up $100 in fees because they sent back to me a deposit written against a well-funded personal account.
I know what you're thinking: you should wait for deposits to clear before writing checks, right? Well, let's face it—when you have to pay bills and get one paycheck per month, you send your deposit in one day and your bills the next and hope that everything falls into place. That's not irresponsibility: that's life—you don't have 7 days to wait for your bank to decide whether they'll accept your deposit! (There are no deposit-taking ATMs that take Netbank cards anywhere near here.)
I don't expect Netbank to reimburse me for these fees—they've never reimbursed me for anything even when they were clearly in the wrong. I've endured exceptionally long periods for my deposits to clear in the past and took it with a grain of salt. Now I'm a working adult and have bills to pay. I can't take these practices anymore. My husband had a similar problem with a returned deposit back in April. His bank gladly reversed the fees because he's been a long-time customer and they understood it wasn't his fault the deposit had been sent back. Amazing what brick-and-mortar banks still do, eh? What courtesy!
All they had to do was call my bank to verify funds on my deposit.instead they sent it back to me.
They pride themselves on the fact that they are saving on overhead by not having branches and by doing everything electronically. If that really were the case, why couldn't they have sent a e-notice (or CALLED) me when rejecting my deposit so that I could have made arrangements to fund my account immediately? They're certainly quick to notify you when they've charged you fees for returned checks, though!
Because they don't care. Congratulations, you've lost another customer.
Perhaps in the future Netbank will streamline their practices to make it seem less like they hate customers who maintain meager (positive) balances each month.
Tiffany
Central, North Carolina
U.S.A.
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