That’s true, but I don’t see the reason for the distinction between dealing with a banker and moving the money online/at an ATM. In every case, I have to prove that I am me. Moreover, no money is being withdrawn – it’s being moved between accounts that I own. I could understand a withdrawal limit, and I could understand if I was trying to transfer to someone other than me. It’s the block on moving my own money between my own accounts that rankles.
Moreover, banking hours make it difficult for me to conduct banking business in person. My bank has fortunately added limited hours on Saturdays, but that’s the only time I can get there.
Beadalin my bank has some limits in place with accounts but almost all of them you can bypass if you use the phone system and talk to a real person. Their phone services run on holidays and at much longer than standard banking hours. Does your bank have a telephone banking option?
I work in desinging the online banking tools for a reasonably sized bank. I know of now regulatory reason for limiting online transfers between accounts in the same institution. For my bank we allow you to transfer up to $100 million at a time between two internal accounts (why you’d have that much in a single account I can’t fathom but if you do you can).
So, I assume any such limits were decided at the institutional level and is probably related to their risk and fraud tolerance. One big difference between online and doing things in person and at ATMs is that it is easily automated allowing a lot of transfers quickly between a lot of accounts. Especially at institutions that allow opening new accounts online. One big problem with online banking fraud is how to actually get the money out of the bank once you’ve snagged it.
For example, trying to get more than $10,000 in cash out of a bank at a time is going to cause additional scrutiny, but if you can take the $100,000 in one account and divvy it evenly between 11 different accounts you can withdraw it from the bank the same day before fraud flags are triggered.
There are other ways to deal with all of this but I can see a banks fraud loss people saying “just limit them to X in online transfers per day and let them come talk to us if they need more.”
This is one of the reasons I’m very glad to be friends with a bank VP who has several decades of experience. She knows large chunks of the regs by memory and what she doesn’t know by heart she knows how to find.
If you’re interested in the federal banking regulations, they’re collected in Title 12 of the Code of Federal Regulations, kindly available through the tubes of the intarweb courtesy of the U.S. government.
