Every bank account can be said to have a financial cost – either the fees paid from the use of the account or the opportunity cost from not putting the money somewhere with a higher return.
However, I believe that different bank accounts also have different emotional costs – specifically the worry that should something go wrong, you will have to pay for it in dollars, either as a fee or some other loss.
For online banking (which I use exclusively), I feel that the design and information present in a bank’s website is the biggest determiner of the emotional costs of banking. Though my online money market account with Capital One is a good overall product, the cluttered, humorless feel of their website keeps a small worry in the back of my mind that a minor slipup on my part could see me slapped with a fee.
By comparison, the fun, streamlined feel of the ING Direct website is much more calming to me. Though the actual terms of my accounts with them don’t differ much from Capital One, I feel that I worry much less about something going wrong there than I do with Capital One. There’s isn’t much rational reason for this – ING’s website just seems to convey the sense that they’re not trying to trick me into making a mistake for the sake of hitting me with a fee.
Though I don’t have accounts with them, I’ve also been impressed by some parts of both Ally Bank and Schwab Banking’s websites. Ally Bank’s very fun-looking, web 2.0 homepage goes out of the way to point out that they have “no sneaky disclaimers,” and their individual product pages make most of the terms fairly clear. Over at Schwab, I was impressed to see that the FAQs for their online checking account have a “What’s the catch?” item that lays out the terms quite well. Though not a banking service, the peer-to-peer lending service Lending Club also offer a very low stress user experience.
What I’d really like to see from a bank, however, is a prominent list of “All possible account fees.” It’s rarely obvious from the documentation included with these accounts what happens if you make a transfer for more than the balance of an account or commit some other minor snafu. Having a list of every possible fee one could receive – as well as the situations that will never result in a fee – would contribute enormously to dispelling the emotional cost of an account and contributing to peace of mind.
I hope some banking decision maker somewhere is reading this, because I’ll be first in line to endorse whichever bank adds this kind of feature to an already solid banking product.
Does anyone else out there in personal finance land feel this way as well?
