Seems It’s Really Hard to Keep Track of Two Checks

I am endlessly amazed by banks. How it’s possible for them to give such limited service, repeatedly cut on what they do give and never find themselves with new competition is something quite extraordinary. Now I know that in Canada there are a number of regulations so there wont be a new bank springing up soon but there is no innovation amongst the existing ones, they compete on details and offer nothing new. Lets see the “service” I get from my bank (BMO but they are all the same, some even worse);

• Very limited business hours. 15 minute wait on average to deposit a check.
• Why do I deposit checks? Because I can’t make deposits in US currency (which I have to do periodically). Or rather, I could but they can’t garanty they’ll notice the currency right away, funds might be frozen when they do and make the switch, they don’t recommend doing that.
• Can’t take out money from my US account at the ATM, I can accept that here, I wouldn’t expect two currencies in the machine but even in the US I have to take money out of my Canadian acount.
• No one at the branch knows anything, sometimes someone downtown will know, they always have to call.

• New set of fees for transactions. More expensive. So you’re giving me less service, less business hours, I use a cashier once every 3 months and you still need to charge me more? How is that possible? Automation savings only work for you I guess. (not BMO this time, Desjardins)

  I could go on but the reason for this post; they don’t keep track of individual checks. For some random reason I often end up depositing 2-3 or even 4 checks at once, recently they changed the steps at the ATM and you can enter all checks one after the other, feeding them in afterwards, all in one envelop. Cool, quicker, less paper…. but then everything is in one amount everywhere. Unless I note it somewhere first or right after before I forget, there is no trace anywhere of the individual amounts!! WTF??? Receipt? One amount. Online? One amount. Paper account statement? One amount. Chick at the counter? One amount. Accounting for my company? Separate amounts.

  Now granted, I can just note it. Pain in the ass but I could. But how the hell are they running their systems that they don’t even have the basic level of granularity of identifying my two frickin’ checks? It blows my mind that I can get money out from some ATM out in the boonies of pretty much any country on earth but they can’t tell me what the checks were individually when I deposited $1974.62.

  Mind. Blown.