Adventure in banking

Banks should do better by their customers

I laughed.

“Reg CC?” I said. “What is that?”

I was sitting in a parking lot, talking with Natasha who works for Hudson River Community Credit Union, which had just charged me $28 for depositing a check that had bounced.

After 15 minutes of back and forth, getting put on hold three times and repeated demands from me that she tell me where I could find the amount of the fee that she claimed the bank had to pay to the federal government because the check bounced, she came back with this response: “Reg CC.”

“Really?” I said, laughing.

I was being a jerk, but I felt justified. How was I supposed to know that the person who wrote the check lacked the funds to cover it?

“You accepted it,” Natasha said. “You chose to accept the check.”

“So did you,” I said.

And, unlike me, the credit union had ways to find out if the check was good.

I’m a longtime customer of yours, I said. You have my mortgage.

But my arguments bounced right off her.

“Why am I being charged a fee for someone else’s bad check?”

“Because we get charged a fee by the feds,” she said.

“You get charged $28?”

“We are feed, yes.”

That’s right. She said “feed.”

“I find it hard to believe that every time a check bounces, the federal government charges the bank $28.”

“We are feed,” she said.

“Can you send me something that shows this fee that the feds charge? Can you tell me where to find the regulation that sets this fee?”

That’s when, after a long hold, she came back with “Reg CC.”

I had started taking notes by then, and I told her I was going to write about our interaction.

“I’m a journalist,” I said. “I’m retired, but I write for an online newsletter.”

She had been patient, but I could tell she was getting ready to hang up. But now, after I sprang the “online newsletter” surprise, there was a pause.

“You know what? Hang on a second.”

In a second, I was transferred to Sara, who had a sunny tone in her voice.

“Our board of directors sets the fee,” she said. “This is what we have agreed to.”

But she admitted she didn’t know how big the fee was that the credit union was charged for a bounced check.

“Am I saying it’s $28 or $1? I don’t have that exact dollar amount.”

I don’t have it either, although I have poked around in the thickets of the Federal Reserve website, including under “Reg CC,” which concerns “Availability of Funds and Collection of Checks.”

Reg CC mostly addresses the expeditious processing of checks. I couldn’t find any mention of fees charged to banks when checks bounce.

If there is such a fee, I bet it’s 5 cents or less.

From what I can gather, banks do pay the Federal Reserve for general check processing services, but those cost pennies per check, or less.

Sara said the credit union would refund the $28 fee “as a one-time courtesy for a customer in good standing.”

I’d like to think this kindness had nothing to do with me saying I was writing about the experience for my very influential online newsletter.

I don’t blame Natasha for stonewalling me. It’s the policy that is wrong.

It is this sort of unjustified soaking of customers that makes people bitter and suspicious in their dealings.

I love seeing the fruit and vegetable stands along the road in the summer with no one tending them — just a box provided for payment — because they show that trust, and honesty, still exist.

Community relies on trust. Otherwise, we are a collection of Scrooges, squinting at each other.

It matters how our institutions behave, because they set the standard. If banks and other businesses (cable comes to mind, for some reason) take every opportunity to rip us off, why should we be different?

We should be different, and most people are. Too bad the institutions that are supposed be community leaders can’t be as fair and honest as their customers.

Readings

Some books are projects, like “Voyage of the Beagle,” by Charles Darwin, which I read a little while ago and which took me months to get through. Others are treats, like Ross Macdonald’s novels, starring private eye Lew Archer. I just reread one, “The Zebra Striped Hearse.”

Here’s an excerpt, from the first page:

“She wasn’t using her charm on me, exactly. The charm was merely there. I unlocked the outer door and led her across the waiting room, through the door marked Private, into my inner office, where I placed a chair for her.

She sat upright with her black leather bag under her elbow, touching as little of the chair as possible. Her gaze went to the mug shots on the wall, the faces you see in bad dreams and too often on waking. They seemed to trouble her. Perhaps they brought home to her where she was and who I was and what I did for a living.”

So much is in that, and, especially, the feeling of unfolding tragedy that  suffuses the Archer novels. The rest of the book is just as good. I don’t make much of an effort to follow the plot as I read his books — it all comes together at the end — but I soak in their portentous unraveling, knowing that Archer will travel into hell and back, seemingly for no reason other than to finish the case he started.