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My online banking tirade

Without naming names, let’s say I keep all my accounts at a certain Whistler bank branch. I used to bank at different financial institutions in Ontario and Nova Scotia, then opened a new account at another bank when I arrived in Whistler in 1999.

Without naming names, let’s say I keep all my accounts at a certain Whistler bank branch. I used to bank at different financial institutions in Ontario and Nova Scotia, then opened a new account at another bank when I arrived in Whistler in 1999. Last year I moved banks once again when my wife and I pooled our resources.

Now all of our accounts — mortgage, chequing, savings, RRSPs, line of credit — exist at a single bank. All of our apples are in one basket, so to speak.

I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing — it’s one of the biggest banks in Canada and would be one of the last to go under in a financial catastrophe. Besides, we owe them ten times more than we have in all our accounts.

What is bad is that this particular apple basket completely sucks when it comes to online banking, which is really the only kind of banking that I do.

For one thing, there’s no way to use the information presented online to figure out how much money you had at the start of the month or the end of the month — unless you always look at your account on the first and last of the month and write that information down somewhere else. Unlike the two previous banks I’ve banked with online, this particular financial institution does not show your balance after every single transaction you make — which means there’s no looking backwards to find out what your balance was after any given transaction, which means I have no frame of reference to track our finances online.

Cheques come in, money goes out, and we never have the slightest idea what any of it really means. In order to track our accounts and keep to any kind of a budget it looks like we will actually have to start keeping an entirely separate set of books.

I’ve complained about the lack of a balance column a number of times, and in reply I’ve been fed a line of B.S. about how electronic balances and actual balances can differ sometimes and was advised to refer to our paper statement to get accurate balance information — which also doesn’t tell us the exact information we need to know, when we need to know it. Besides, we’d much prefer to go paperless and stop getting mail altogether.

What the bank couldn’t explain is why other banks can in fact give you an accurate, instant electronic balance after every single transaction you make. It’s just a simple matter for banks to get their website servers to talk to their central computer servers which do track your transactions in real-time.

But that’s not the worst of it. Our credit card statement comes in the middle of every month and our balance is due on the last day. Because we like to start each month with a clean slate we always check our online credit card balance on the last day of the month and make a payment in that amount. Imagine our surprise last week when we checked our account and found that our credit card balance was over double what we actually spent since the start of the month. It turns out we had an additional balance owing we didn’t know about that didn’t show up at either the bank machine or our online account.

I called the bank to find out what was going on and was informed that the balance given on the online banking site is not our actual balance, as some transactions might still be processing. It all makes no sense. We paid off what we thought was our credit card balance once on Aug. 27 and then made another full payment on Aug. 31 after we had some work done on the car — and somehow still missed paying more than $500?

The person at the call centre said we should always call their 1-800 banking number on the last of the month to get an accurate balance, “if it’s not too inconvenient”.

Of course it’s too inconvenient! I do my banking online for a reason — I don’t want to have to keep track of every piece of paper the bank sends to me for all my accounts, and then add up every transaction by hand to figure out how much money we actually had or have at any given time. And I most definitely do not want to have to call the bank’s automated phone service to get accurate balance information.

Right now it looks like I don’t have any other choice. Given how inconvenient and expensive it would be to switch all my accounts over to another bank, it looks like we’re stuck with our particular financial institution’s half-assed approach to electronic banking until they either fix it or our mortgage comes up for renewal in four years. I’m not exaggerating when I say that other banks I had accounts with 10 years ago offered better online systems than my current bank.

The only way that things are going to change is for enough people to complain and threaten to bank elsewhere. If you belong to this particular bank, the one that doesn’t list your balance after every transaction, then I encourage you to write their customer service department and remind them it’s the 21 st century.

Banks are making huge profits these days, and part of the reason is the money they’re saving on tellers because of bank machines and online banking. The least they could do is reinvest some of that money into an online banking system that works.