I’m going to try valiently to restrain the cursing, but if anyone else is a BankOne customer and using them to pay your bills electronically, could you please help explain to me just what the fsck they’re doing here? I’m using Quicken, BTW.
Old scenario: direct deposit goes into checking on first of the month. My payments are electronically scheduled and paid on the first of the month. The municipal water department gets a laser-printed check that clears when it clears, since they won’t receive electronic transfers.
New scenario: I schedule a payment for the first. A dialogue pops up warning me that funds will be widthdrawn on March 23! I dismiss it, and schedule the next payment. Same dialogue. Okay, this is getting annoying… but I finish. Next, I transmit my payments like always. The status at the end says, your register has been updated to reflect that funds will be widthdrawn as early as March 30! WTF??? I don’t have a deposit going in until the 1st!
So I investigate their “new and improved” bill pay. It appears they’re going to “process” electronic payments early to “help me” by making sure they’re paid on time. Okay – they’re electronic. They’ve been instant since at least 1995 when I was using CheckFree. Oh, for those places they send checks to, they’re going to take out my funds five days early. This is a check I’m talking about. Funds aren’t supposed to disappear until the check gets there. WTF happens if the check gets lost in the mail? Bank already took it out, payee has nothing to present, and now my money is in a black whole somewhere.
Okay, how about double-entry accounting? Money leaves my account on such and such a date, then is applied to my other account on such and such a day – where does sitting in a black-hole limbo fit in?
Quite frankly, I’m concerned that BankOne is making a friggin’ mistake. So the GQ (there is one) is, what the heck can I try to do about this? Unless all you have is $5 in a passbook account, it’s not easy to leave a bank. Is there anyplace worth complaining to? Federal? State of Mich.? State of Whereever-they’re-HQ’d? Hell, if nothing I’d like to bust 'em on false advertising; “improved” banking experience my ass.
Don’t know who can act on your complaint, but you can vote with your feet by switching to Paytrust. I changed from Checkfree about 3 years ago when an identity theft had me switching bank accounts every month for 3 months. Every time, Checkfree’s check writing department would process the change immediately, but their own accounts receivable department would take about a month to catch up - and would submit the payment to a dead account, assume I was a deadbeat, and pull the carpet out from under me.
Paytrust isn’t perfect either. Their new web page design gives me transaction reports (".qif" files) with no transactions in them, and I’ve gone around a couple times with tech support but haven’t figured it out yet. But at least they aren’t doing this crap yet.
But the sound of this is an ugly, ugly thing. The more sense bank-by-web makes, the more people are going to insert themselves in the process with sneaky ways of ripping you off.
This is what I thought anyway, but if my money’s in the account anyway, then they’re making money anyway, right?
Switching to another bank is starting to seem attractive. FWIW, I got a hold of an allegedly good email address at Bank One, and I’ll see if their explanations are satisfactory.
Bzzzzz!! I’m sorry, wrong answer! This move has nothing to do with the JP Morgan & Bank One merger.
Little inside info from my past life here kids.
1.) As far as the merger goes, both B1 and JPM use the same vendor for their basic internet banking platform. They each use a different Electronic Bill Payment and Presentment (EBPP) vendor.
2.) This change in processing is a direct result of an initiative started a few months ago by B1 (independent of any possible merger) to switch their EBPP vendor from CheckFree to Princeton eCom. Along with the switch to a new processor, they also switched the payment model from Risk Managed to Good Funds.*
3.) Integration of the two internet banking platforms between B1 and JPM should be one of the smoothest aspects of the merger since they both operate on the same core product platform from the same solution provider. It’ll be far more difficult to integrate backend systems.
It’s been awhile, I may have those two payment models backwards.
Interesting… I never knew that CheckFree was behind Bank One. I left CheckFree back in '97 'cos Bank One started offering the service directly that works with Quicken. Back in those days, to use CheckFree you had to use CheckFree’s special software.
I’ll see if (1) CheckFree still works with individuals, and (2) It works with Quicken.
Well, I do not want to get into too much detail as a.) I might be saying more than I should and b.) I could go into really granular detail on this that would bore your socks off.
CheckFree did not back Bank One’s online banking, they only processed the daily EBPP remit files from Bank One’s online banking platform. Support for multiple EBPP processors is integrated into the product that Bank One uses for online banking. The payment info is stored on the online banking platform and batched daily and transmitted to the EBPP provider for processing. A return file is also received from the EBPP processor and processed by the online banking platform.
CF offers a Web Bill Pay solution also, whereas a bank’s online banking platform can present an actual CF server’s web pages to handle their bill payment functionality. This would be transparent to the end user that they were actually submitting directly to CF.
CheckFree still offers individual bill payment/presentment services to consumers through their site, third-party sites, etc.
Quicken/Money both support OFX and should still support EBPP functionality. In this instance, Quicken/Money talk via the OFX standard to an OFX server which would either a.) link to the consumer’s bank or b.) directly to CF or other EBPP provider. Depends on the situation of course. The cheap-quick solution that many banks offer is a .qif flat file download which you manually upload into Quicken but that lacks interactive functionality and would not be what you referred too - I think.
The explanations aren’t boring – quite the contrary.
What I want to do is use Quicken to schedule my payments, and continue to receive my banking activity online. The later shouldn’t be a big deal – I just use someone else’s billpay rather than BankOne’s – hopefully one that takes the money when it’s used rather than just for hell of it.
But now that I’ve looked, it seems like CheckFree doesn’t have a direct-to-consumer bill payment service any more, except their free web-based model. Some USENET searching indicates that Intuit handles the front end via Quicken Bill Pay – not bad for $9.95, as I seem to recall paying $12.95 for CheckFree as early as 1997. But I can’t determine if they use the charge-then-pay model, or the charge-when-pay model. Ironically, I’d be happy to pay Bank One to leave it the old way than to accept their free subpar service as it is now, if it were an option.
So this brings up another question: is it safe to assume that anyone that processes via CheckFree is the model I’m after (the non-screwing kind)? CheckFree provides a nice list of local banks that process through them, should I deem a bank change necesssary. Or is there a possibility that despite using CheckFree, some of these banks are the put-my-money-in-a-black-hole-for-four-days type?
QIF downloads just don’t happen with me – it’s not convenient. With Quicken I can get to my 401(k), my bank, three different credit cards, and it’s all one-stop shopping. If I had to visit five different sites to get their damn QIF files, I’d upset me, kind of to the same degree that these shenanigans of Bank One are inciting in me.
The fact is, my complaint is mostly in principle rather to any degree of severity. So I pay my bills a few days later. The idea of what they’re doing just makes me grate my teeth.
