OFX Banking Choices
Posted October 10th, 2007 by Shawn Parr
in
Since ING will be dropping OFX support we need to find a new bank. Obviously as we search, it is very unlikely we will find any that gave us the same service that Netbank was known for. So we basically have a few items to prioritize: OFX support, fees for OFX support, and interest rate being our 'biggies.' While having a high interest rate for our checking account is nice, we don't really make a lot of money from that, so low fee or free OFX is our primary concern. We started the search by checking banks that we already have a business relationship with: loans, credit cards, etc. We also hit Google. Here is what we have found thus far:
- PNC Bank: Our choice thus far. A spunky little bank out of Pennsylvania with free OFX download and bill pay. Their basic checking has no interest, and they have some with interest. Interest bearing accounts have a monthly fee, although those can be waived if you maintain a minimum monthly balance.
- Chase Bank: Free online banking and bill pay. Similar checking accounts to PNC, where interest bearing accounts have a fee unless you maintain a balance. In one weird difference, credit card debt can be part of that balance. So you can either have $2000 of money you own in an account, or be in hock $2000 to them and it works the same towards the fee waiver. Chase supports OFX, although it isn't stated on their website, and they do not mention fees. I emailed them for information and received no replies. This is really interesting since we have a credit card account with them.
- Bank of America: $10 a month for direct connect. Otherwise similar to everything else thus far.
- Wells Fargo: This is where we had accounts before moving to Netbank. It was something like $3 per month for Direct Connect. Online Bill Pay is $6 per month if I remember correctly. I researched it again last week, but can't find the exact numbers right now. Basically $9 per month for the full online experience though.
We quickly perused a few more, but that is basically what we have found. PNC is definitely the winner for us on this one. For the time being we are going to leave our old Netbank Money Market account with ING due to much higher interest rate. We have just started taking a certain amount at the end of each month and putting it in there and with so few transactions OFX won't be missed nearly as much as with our checking account. Please leave a comment, or use the contact form if you have found anything else of interest, especially if it is a better deal!
I went by Wachovia and
I went by Wachovia and opened an account today, the Crown Access. You have to maintain a $1500 balance or have a credit card with a limit of $5000+ to get the monthly fees waived, you do not need to carry a balance on the card just meet the credit limit requirements. They assured me they have Direct Connect for both transactions and bill pay and the $5.95 monthly charge will be waived, plus I can go to the branch near my house, something I never had and missed with netbank.
That sounds like a pretty
That sounds like a pretty good deal. Unfortunately I live in an area where none of the local banks have any modern features. So if I want OFX and bill pay options I pretty much will only have an online experience. I do wish I could get that locally though as it would definitely be way more convenient.
I don't know where you are
I don't know where you are located. If you're in southern California or Arizona, check out Downey Savings. They have free OFX bill pay. They "upgraded" their banking software a few years ago and the OFX bill pay disappeared. However, it's back now (I think it came back in 2006?). Nice bank to deal with, too. Unlike many banks, where it's clear all I am to them is a revenue source, at Downey they still treat you like a customer.
Thanks for the info
Thanks for the info Michael,
Unfortunately I'm nowhere near civilization. That may help others though. :)
Great Article..
Thanks for the Great article.. I am in the exact situation as you and your research helped me make the right decision. PNC or Wachovia.. gotta see which one fits the bill. I would also like an overdraft for the account..
Thanks again.
I don't know about Wachovia,
I don't know about Wachovia (although I imagine they are the same), but PNC does allow overdraft through just about any of their accounts. I spoke with someone on the phone and he mentioned Savings, Credit Card, and a couple of other options that I just didn't pay attention to...
He also tried to get me to upgrade accounts, and was very intelligent about it. He compared the monthly fee to potential ATM fees to point out that it may end up not costing a normal person anything in the end. My family has very unusual banking patterns though, so unless our monthly average would work out it still doesn't make sense for us.
Unless I'm confused, PNC does their averages differently than I've seen before. Most banks state that it is by average daily balance, which I interpret to mean that I have to have above that amount every day of the month with the average of the amount in my account during that day. PNC takes the account balance as of each day, adds them up, and divides by the number of days in the month to arrive at a average monthly balance. As such, since we are paid monthly, and therefore have a lot of money in our account the first week or two it could work out for us. However most of our bills also happen at the beginning of the month, so our balance drops quickly then stays at an average level for the middle of the month, and low at the end of the month. I would have to sit down and figure it out, I just haven't gotten up the moxie to sit down and crunch the numbers. Coming up with the balance for every day on an account can be time consuming if you aren't debiting and crediting every single day.
Average Daily Balance
I came across your page while searching for "Average Daily Balance" definitions. The way you describe what PNC does seems to be the meaning of Average Daily Balance, consistent with the various definitions I have found.
From Wachovia's "Personal Finance Glossary":
Average Daily Balance
An amount calculated by adding together all the daily balances of the billing cycle and dividing the sum total by the number of days within that cycle.
Also see here and here.
So anyway, that seems to be what they all do. I do know what you mean though, I have had accounts in the past where if your balance fell below a certain number on ANY day then you would get a service fee for that month. I believe, however, that is called a "minimum balance".
Thanks for the information,
Thanks for the information, searching for minimum fees is not an easy task. I still think that no fee balance transfers is the best option we can possibly find. Of course this all depends our specific financial needs.
Check out Schwab bank. They
Check out Schwab bank. They offer everything Netbank had, although I'm not sure about the free OFX as I don't use that feature.
Other than that little bit of uncertaintly, they're a total replacement. They charge no fees and offer high interest, free bill pay, and free deposit envelopes. Additionally, they offer ATM rebates for any fees charged by other banks as well as free printing on paper checks - things that Netbank never offered.
I decided to move there after the Netbank closing, and couldn't be happier with them.
Thanks for the info.
Thanks for the info. However for my family, OFX was the primary concern! Especially if we will be banking with an non-local bank, and where we live that really tends to be the best option.
PNC and Chase
Thanks very much for making this information available. I've been doing online banking through First Union, then Lighthouse Bank, then NetBank since 1996. It's not acceptable to lose the electronic and automatic payment features and the integration with MS Money that I have grown to love over the years.
I checked out the demo for PNC Bank, and was impressed A) that they even had a demo, B) that it was comprehensive, C) that their user interface for bill pay is almost identical to that of NetBank:
https://www.pnc.com/webapp/unsec/ProductsAndService.do?siteArea=/PNC/Hom... (click on New Online Banking and Bill Pay Interactive Demo on the left)
I also finally found the demo for Chase, though it was buried a few clicks deep. Their user interface also looks impressive, though some of their tabbed menus acted a little funny while trying to get there:
http://demo.chase.com/presents/banking/demochase/DemoStart.html?seg=AUT
I'm going to give PNC Bank a shot, as its user experience most closely mirrors what I've come to enjoy about NetBank.
Thanks again,
Mike
PNC and billing with Moneydance
So how is bill paying working for you all with PNC?
Sean, I noticed your ticket in MoneyDance's Trac wiki. It looks like PNC is acting a little weird when you create payees in Moneydance. Does it behave better when you create the payee in the web site and then make the payment in MoneyDance? Is that even possible?
I'm looking to move to a bank like PNC that supports OFX, in order to do bill payment directly within Moneydance. It seems like the only way to actually test this, however, is to open an account at PNC, put some money there, and try to pay some bills. Do you have any other techniques for testing this without actually depositing money and risking a screwed up bill payment?
Thanks,
Willis Morse
First off let me say that
First off let me say that Bill Pay through Money Dance does work, but it can be very weird, and involves a leap of faith.
Apparently PNC is one of many banks that use a 3rd party service to handle OFX transfers, both in and out. What this means is that there is a bit of a disconnect between what you see in your software and what you see on the website. For downloads it really only means that there is about a 24 hour delay or so between when something shows up on the website and when it appears for downloads.
For bill pay it basically means when you create a payee on the website, it never appears in your software, and if you create it in software it never appears on the website. So in order to have it available in both (i.e. to get notifications from the bank when a bill is ready) you have to put them in both manually. The other weird thing, and the leap of faith, is that when you use Money Dance to pay a bill, it never appears on the bank website, so you don't really really know it is there until when it gets payed. I tested it with a $1 payment for my cell phone service between bills and it was successful, but if there was some kind of an issue one would never know until probably too late.
Now up until about two or so months ago, I never had a bill pay failure with Money Dance. It always worked. Then ING took over Netbank and random payments would vanish from the website. This of course has nothing to do with MD, as they payments originally appeared on the website then disappeared. However it has made me a bit paranoid.
If these things also make you concerned, I would greatly suggest looking into OFX information online to see if the bank you are considering has their own OFX server, or are using a 3rd party. Many alternative software packages require manual entry and there are a few sources online to find the URLs for the OFX servers. A good way to start is if the URL is for the most part the same as the bank's website URL they are probably using their own server. If the URL is similar to a number of other banks, they are using 3rd party servers.
I guess I'll pass on OFX
That's great info.
The last thing I need in my life right now is a leap of faith when it comes to paying my mortgage :-) So I think I'm going to stick with using the web site's UI to pay bills. I think I'll open a seperate bank account just to pay bills electronically for fixed costs like mortgage, utilities, car payments, etc. That will get a lot of the churn out of the checking account, which may incrementally improve my life enough for now. I guess I don't really need good quality OFX support for that, which gives me a lot more options for new bank.
Thanks for the help,
Willis Morse
Demo posting
in the banking feild what is the meaning of demo posting?
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