Surviving Online Banking Hell - Two weeks with WAMU

About two weeks ago I began to have a problem with my bank of many years. I am, as you would not be surprised to find out, an electronic kind of guy. I have not written a check for more than seven years. I also travel a lot, so being able to access my bills and pay them from anywhere is important to me.

It began with a deposit of a cashier’s check from a joint investment account to a bank account, which happened to be with WAMU. Both accounts have the same name on them but the check was pretty large. The bank put a 10 day hold on the check. I wrote them and asked why that was necessary. But in the next day two more things happened. First, they disallowed the signature on the check – I had endorsed it but my wife had not. Most banks, because it was a known customer with a check going from a joint account to a joint account would have honored the endorsement or sought a clarification. But WAMU simply disallowed the check.

Second, they claimed that my account had been invaded or phished. There was only one incident but when I discovered it I spoke with their “consumer” service (more on how inapt that title is later) and was informed that the only way we could unlock the account was to a) create a new account and close that one or b) have me ask to unlock the account and then take full responsibility for ANY future invasion of the account. Obviously, I was unwilling to do the latter, especially when I re-read their online banking guarantee.

WAMU is pretty explicit about their online banking guarantee – the first sentence in the website explanation (displayed prominently) says “For any fraudulent or unauthorized transaction that has been initiated during an online banking session at wamu.com, WAMU will provide 100% reimbursement of the transaction amount plus any related account charges imposed by WAMU or lost account interest resulting from such transaction.” The guarantee also requires customers to take some responsibility. You have to create a password which would be “hard for others to detect.” (Although their level of security is alphanumeric and does not include the possibilities for control characters AND has no periodic suggestions to change your password, as many other financial institutions do. Thus, the level of security for the password is not very stringent and they don't take the notion of changing passwords to stop intrusions seriously. Both of those things tell me WAMU is not serious enough about that “hard for others to detect” standard. You also have to report suspected fraudulent transactions “within 60 days.” The “guarantee” then says that WAMU will provide a full reimbursement for the amount of any fraudulent or unauthorized transaction which occurs on your account during an online banking session at wamu.com. That means $0 liability for fraudulent or unauthorized activity on your account.” That sure does not seem to be what they said to me.

I soon discovered that WAMU had locked down all of our accounts including ones which do not use online bill pay. That meant that not only could I not get into the specific account which had been allegedly compromised but I could not use my ATM card nor my wife’s account (because her and my accounts are linked) was also locked down. I went to a nearby branch bank and asked how we could fix the problem. The young manager advised me to keep the account (s) locked and start a new account. I specifically asked if all of my payees would transfer over to the new account and I was assured that would be done. I soon discovered that was false.

One of the other key assertions made by that manager was that, after I had called my wife, all of the uncleared checks on her account would be honored. At the end of this week we discovered that even that was false. They returned a check to our market. Since then several others of the listed checks have been returned. That has required my wife to go into the branch and got that corrected and the bank did that but the inconvenience was still annoying.

When I discovered the online banking profile was locked and seemingly immovable I called the online banking help desk and was told two different things. First, I was told that nothing could be done to get my “profile” and at the same time I was told that it could be gotten to me by speaking with the fraud department. (Which I did.) For a couple of days, nothing happened.

On about the third day of this travesty, I wrote a friend of my daughter’s who works for another division of WAMU, explained my situation and asked if she knew who the right person to call was. She graciously offered to help with the “excellence” team. I was then contacted a day or so later by a team member from that group who left a number for me to call and despite four or five calls and voicemails I was never able to get the problem solver to call me back. So much for excellence.

I tried again to use their electronic comment section. But the responses I got from those people show they are very poorly trained. For example, I asked in an email on June 22 “Could you please restore my payee list or give me a printout of the billers?” The response I got said in part “Thank you for your email. I apologize for any inconvenience that caused to you. Please be advised, you may not change the account number.” The email went on to say that I could change the account which I designated as my primary account for bill paying. I did that, but still could not retrieve my payees. The quality of the online help was either inaccurate or off the mark.

Three days later I went into another branch and spoke to another manager, who like my daughter’s friend, was very gracious. She looked at the account and said “let me escalate this” and immediately called somebody in the technical part of the online banking group and I then spoke to a guy who said he would resolve my problem with two business days. On the third day he called me near the close of the day to inform me that it was not possible to get my list of payees. That wasted another two days and I am reasonably sure he did little to look into whether it was possible to generate a printout of the billers. WAMU truncates the information about the payees (presumably as a security measure (although other banks I deal with do not do this). So even if I went through the transaction history (which did) I could not restore the information on my payees. The locked account allows me to see transactions, I just cannot get into my payee list or transfer it.

I have a several comments. First, although they were not able help solve the problems, I am appreciative of the efforts by the second manager and my daughter’s friend to try to help. They did their best but the WAMU organization was not up to trying to serve their customers. It is too bad that WAMU does not have more people like that. Second, it seems to me that an entrepreneur could produce something very useful for those of us who use electronic banking to keep all of our payees in a secure environment so that in the event we move from one bank to another or in the event that an account gets compromised we are not forced to re-enter all the account information. Third, from my dozen or more calls to the 1-800 number, I would conclude that the staff for that operation runs between incompetent and surly. WAMU’s service training lacks both the appropriate level of consumer attention and a decent understanding of their products. That has not been my wife’s experience with the telephone bankers but it certainly was reinforced by my attempts to work with the online banking people. Fourth, if WAMU were really concerned about security they would increase the complexity of their passwords. Most of the other financial institutions that I work with take two precautions. They remind users to periodically change their passwords and they offer a security indicator which shows how secure the potential password will be. To my knowledge security is enhanced by increasing the number and type of characters (alpha is less secure than alpha-numeric and alpha-numeric with control characters(#$%&) is even more secure. Fifth, in the end I took the large check back and had it wired to them. That resulted in a $10 charge. The bank seems inclined to ignore that as an electronic client once my systems are set up they send me no statements, they process no checks - all transactions on this account are in 1s and 0s. That saves them a boatload of dough. Ditto for the wire transfer. Until this transaction, compared to their average customer, the costs I generated from my use of their services were minimal. I took care of establishing and verifying the payee list. I hooked in on a periodic basis to do bills - most of which are sent electronically and none of which are processed back to me. But this bank seems to have treated me as a nuisance.

Ultimately, I realize I am a demanding customer. But there is a tradeoff. When an electronic account works well and can actually solve problems, I have reduced the net cost of servicing me as a customer. Since it has been available, I have not had a statement sent to me (Postage Savings), all of my transactions including most deposits and all withdrawals have been electronic (reducing staff time and demands on branch personnel).

Changing banks is annoying, but I was left with no other choice. In the next few day I will close my account with WAMU (after all the remaining EFTs have cleared.) We are still considered whether to completely sever our relationship with WAMU. My wife likes the convenience of the branch (she is completely non-electronic and writes a number of small checks). She also frequently uses the telephone banker. Both of those choices generate costs for WAMU that are undoubtedly greater than for an account that uses electronic deposit and electronic transactions and ATMs. WAMU talks about its commitment to to service - indeed one of the mottos is "Making you happy makes us happy." I guess that is not true either.