Saturday, November 14, 2009

Fee on bank overdraft

A friend told me that the bank in America have an unfair practice to levy the overdraft fee on many transactions during a month.

For example, if the customer has a few transactions that may result in an overdraft, the bank will debit the largest transaction first to cause the account to be overdrawn. All subsequent transactions will be overdraft and each will attract an overdrawn fee. It may result in the fee being applied to many transactions in a month.

The US Congress is passing a law to disallow a bank from this kind of practice and to require the bank to debit the transactions in the chronological order that they have been received.

I find this type of practice to be dishonest. However, the bank seems to be able to get away with it, and a new law has to be passed to stop them from continuing with it. It seems that the standard of honesty has dropped to a low level and that bankers need a law to tell them what is honesty.