Years ago banks were required to return your checks once they were cashed and processed for payment. That enable the customer to verify that the checks were legitimate and to allow for easier check book balancing.
Then came the internet and all your statements were available online along with electronic images of your processed checks. This was a great thing for convenience purposes and saved the banks millions in postage since if you opted for the online banking they wouldnt have to mail you the statements and checks, a win win situation in my opinion.
However, since the government has put controls on the banks ability to charge certain fees for overdrafts and intense competition regarding atm fee's the banks are left to find alternative means to drive earnings.
Enter PNC. PNC has decided to charge you $3.00 for each time you look at an electronic recorded image lol. So, take my situation. I deposited several rental checks from tenants and wrote a checks to cover some bills. On a rainy day I dropped my check book and the ledger into a puddle and it caused the ledger to become unreadable. An unfortunate accident but no problem, I can just go online and look through the transactions and rebuild a new ledger to track my account. Hahaha, jokes on me! To see those transactions you must agree to pay them $3.00 per view!!! Imagine that if each webpage you looked at you had to pay $3.00? You would go broke lol. So instead of paying $3.00 for each image I am left to guess at which bills I paid and which tenants paid their rent this month. I called around and this is not common practice, a few other banks are doing it but mostly not. So, I will take my banking to another bank and wait to see what kind of crazy abusive fee they come up with to drive their profits lol. Different bank different issue, banks really are a broken business model for depositors, credit unions are much much much better, think I'll check some of them out.
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