Here we go again, said Dan Fitzpatrick and David Enrich in The Wall Street Journal. Just months after angry customers forced Bank of America to backtrack on a proposed $5 monthly debit card fee, the bank is again considering “sweeping changes” to the way it charges customers. Pilot programs in Arizona, Georgia, and Massachusetts are testing monthly charges of between $6 and $9 for the bank’s most basic accounts; other customers face fees of up to $25 a month unless they maintain minimum balances or use a bank credit card. BofA is hardly alone, said Pallavi Gogoi in the Associated Press. Since November, Wells Fargo has been charging $15 a month for some checking accounts, and Citibank customers carrying a balance of under $15,000 are now paying $20 per month. Banks “say they need to make money, or at least cover the cost of doing business.”
The banks are recycling the same old excuses, said Martha C. White in Time.com. They say new and pending regulations will cut deeply into their profits, so they have to apply new fees to stay afloat. Last week, a JPMorgan Chase executive told investors that if new regulations took effect, the bank would lose money on 70 percent of its customers who have less than $100,000 in deposits or investments. The big banks’ lack of appreciation for clients “helped the nation’s credit unions more than double their number of new customers last year,” said E. Scott Reckard and Jim Puzzanghera in the Los Angeles Times. That should be a “warning sign” to banks that they can’t keep acting as if they have no competition. “Consumers have made it loud and clear that they are fed up,” says Norma Garcia of the Consumers Union.
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