Banks Make Overdraft Policies Friendlier

According to Greg McBride, the senior financial analyst of a Florida-based Bankrate.com, “We are tracking credit trends and consumer banking – we found out that banks are bolstering their public images while dealing with reality that they’re being hurt by overdrawn accounts, tough-to-get credit, and foreclosures among others.”

Government pressure is the biggest motivator. Without a doubt, McBride said that fee policy changes were spurred by Washington’s talk about beefing bank practices oversight. He added that “we’re seeing a similar thing happening when the government chased the gotcha practices of credit card companies. Now, they started to back out for a while and the banking industry transformed from being an adversary to becoming a partner.

Ever since Bankrate has been tracking these banks, the fees have gone up for the past 11 years. In a national survey for 2009, it found that $28.95 is the average overdraft fee, which is up 2.1% a year ago. Now, customers pay a $12.55 average to check account maintenance fees, which is up 5% compared to last year. All three banks said that they’re bolstering efforts to educate consumers in tracking their spending or using account balance alerts. However, there are no signs that the banks will include price breaks on other services too.