OT: Business banking suggestions

I (fortunately) don't have to deal with banks at work. We use M&T. (a local Buffalo Bank) The office staff says they are good.

George H.

I try to only go skiing right after a big snow storm, so the snow is still soft. :D

Check out the brokerage firms like fidelity and schwab. A friend of mine has used schwab for years. Also with all the online stuff why limit yourself to just one bank. Chase, WF give you wide access when traveling and such. A local community bank will probably give you better service. You use different types of transistors every day for the right job, use banks the same way.

BTW: Paypal is another bank to have. You can transfer money in/out from one of your other banks.

--
Chisolm 
Republic of Texas

I have never figured out powder. I like my snow packed and groomed.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

A few years back we bought a house and had a mortgage. Then interest rates went down and I refinanced for a lower rate. And then I found I could get a home equity load from Citizens Bank at an even lower rate. It was a var iable rate and the rate was the Prime rate ( published in the WSJ ) minus half a percent.

Citizens Bank is a subsidiarity of The Royal Bank of Scotland. Have not ha d a business acount, but would check them out. They do not nickel and dime you.

Dan

I long ago became fed up with BoA (my main bank after Fleet bought Bank of Boston, and then BoA bought Fleet), so I left the bank. But I relied on their experience with overseas wire transfers, so I kept about $4k there solely for that purpose. That account had a small monthly fee, but a few years ago one of the officers helped me change to a different account type that had no fee.

Now it costs me $40 or $50 for an international wire transfer, and then no charge at all, until I do another one.

I still do the rest of my banking at a local S&L.

--
 Thanks, 
    - Win

There are still S&Ls?

CUs aren't supposed to do business banking.

Writing ransomware?

If you want bad, google WF! Our mortgage is with them (for a couple more months) but I wouldn't let them watch over a dime of mine.

An MT bank? Doesn't sound like a good place to leave money. ;-)

Perhaps that is only in the USA, here in Canada CU's are competing with banks for business customers.

John :-#)#

Manufacturers and Traders Trust company, according to wiki. My personal bank has changed names so many times I've lost count. (Currently Key bank, was First Niagara, HSBC, ...(Fleet?))

Maybe I should move over to M&T.

George H.

I have used my CU for business banking for many years, and they make a big pitch for small business banking customers.

I make them reverse any and all fee they seldom charge.

Modify that towards a Credit Union..

Would Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank be convenient for you? I have been a HSBC client in Hong Kong for business and private purposes for over 20 years, local and international It was not fantastic but reasonable and always transparent.

Having retired, I live elsewhere now. Using the account is still painless. If there are high transfer fees involved they are always caused by the other end.

HSBC was not a part of the great real estate swindle, unlike Shitty Bank and others.

Regards, Werner Dahn

There's an HSBC a couple of miles from here. I'll check them out.

Thanks

Phil Hobbs

I recommend against HSBC. I've been a customer of theirs for close on 20 years, and at first I was delighted that they had proper adults to provide service, both in branches and on the phone, and that they had a reasonable online web application. Nothing has changed except the definition of reasonable. They have continued to refuse to make anything like sensible modern upgrades to the service; for example (my main complaint) you can't access your transaction data older than three months! If you want older data, you have to pay a fee for them to reprint a monthly statement, for each month you want the info.

They have also repeatedly - and despite being told in no uncertain terms - violated reasonable privacy practices in regard their use of email. The worst violation was where they got a bulk email company(!) to send a promotional email, which included my net account balances (!!!). They seemed to think that sharing my contact details AND balances with such a company was ok because they'd signed a contract with them. When I wrote (multiple times) about these kinds of infraction I got fobbed off and finally a stony silence. They clearly do not understand Internet security AT ALL.

I have moved all my banking elsewhere, and I'm in the process of closing my (empty) accounts. My new bank knows how to provide service, they understand privacy, and they allow me to treat my data as if it belongs to me, not them.

There's also this, linked without comment:

Clifford Heath.

This is one of my many complaints with online banking. Banks just don't get it! Online should mean I can access any transaction that has ever happened in my account since it was opened. It cost *literally nothing* to do this. They also should provide adequate tools for searching those transactions. Often they have the tools, but not the history. When I bug them about this they tell me I can download my monthly statements! They just don't *get it*!

I think part of the reason is the history. Banks used to do everything by hand on a monthly statement cycle. That is ingrained, likely by law. When every bank started using computers they didn't own them. They entered the data onto tapes and sent the tapes to a computer outfit that processed the tapes to produce the statements. So still stuck in the monthly cycle with added costs for accessing the backups. Later the banks acquired their own computers, but still the monthly cycle and fees for accessing old data.

Now it is all online and if you are a bank employee, *all* history is at your fingertips. But they still feel they own your data and should charge you for access.

That is clearly unreasonable, but I'm sure their privacy statement says they can supply your information to their "partners".

If you can find someone at HSBC who will even understand what you are talking about, you can let them know why you left.

I'm a little confused about what they did.

'HSBC?s Mexican affiliate channeled $7 billion into the U.S. between

2007 and 2008 which possibly included ?proceeds from illegal drug sales in the United States.?'

How do you channel money from US drug sales *into* the US?

--

Rick C

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia has an excellent online service with 18 months data retention. That's enough for me - since I use the data to do my tax each year, I need at least 15 months to avoid the need to download the data multiple times/year.

It does - but I have refused to allow them to send me statements by email - I don't want that private data on an unencrypted Internet medium - especially not one that is "store and forward" by design. I especially don't want their partners to be doing it.

I know the Australian head of Data Quality personally, and have met socially with the Asia-Pacific Chief Data Officer. Both are very nice and apparently competent people who were horrified by my stories, and neither could do anything about it. That means their internal politics is broken.