Banking at it's Finest

About 6 years ago we switched banks.  It was an easy decision to make.  You see, we'd deposited a check and had the receipt proving we'd made the deposit, but the bank could not find a record of it so they spent 2 weeks looking for it.  Finally they decided to deposit the money in our account even though they couldn't figure out where it had gone (internally any way).  That was a $30 check.  At the time, my husband's company was getting one check that was worth 800 times that.  We decided that if they "misplaced" one of those checks, we'd be in deep trouble... thus we switched banks.

Rather than use a local bank we ended up switching to a national chain.  We wanted to have the ability to access the money from all over the country especially since we weren't sure we wanted to stay where we were at the time (Guess what? We didn't).  As some of my readers are probably aware, when all the bank problems happened a few years ago, some bank mergers happened (mine included).  Since then, they have been slowly moving my bank to the "new" bank.

Last weekend, all account holders who opened their accounts in Virginia were converted (meaning us).  Being that we had 2 companies and our personal accounts to convert, I went a little type A... OK, I went completely type A.  The night before the conversion was supposed to start, I ended up printing off copies of all my balances and online bill pays for all my accounts.

The day after the conversions were supposed to be complete, I went online to check things and both companies were converted just fine.  The problem came when I went to look at our personal accounts.  The accounts themselves had been moved over, but I couldn't find a record of any of my online bill pay stuff.  There were no vendors listed, nor were the 4 payments that I'd set up before the conversion (one of which was set to be paid two days after the conversion).  That necessitated a phone call to my new bank.  After a 45 minute phone call with them, I was told to give the vendor a call whose payment was due the next day and see if they got the payment.

I didn't end up calling the vendor on the date the payment was supposed to be paid because I went online and guess what?  Everything had miraculously shown up!  (Being that I'm a type A person I did call the vendor the next day and found out that the payment was in fact made on time.)

Except for a little bit of a hiccup, the conversion went well.  Overall, I'm pleased.  I just wish they would have called or sent me an email after they'd found my missing data.  Unfortunately, I think that's typical of just about all business dealings.  They fix the problem you call about, but they don't notify you that it's been dealt with. Why is that?  Are they too lazy or is it just the new (low) standard?