Baby steps for ChasaMu

As a loyal 14-year customer of Washington Mutual, I was at first happy to hear that JP Morgan Chase had agreed to charge up on its white steed (not to be confused with Wells Fargo’s horse-drawn stagecoach) to rescue the ailing bank.

I even took advantage of a $100 bonus offer to open a Chase checking account, figuring I might as well get the free money since I’d become a Chase customer soon enough. But as I explored and experimented with being a Chase customer, I began to find a few chinks in the bank armor.

First, in order to have completely free checking I had to set up direct deposit. This I didn’t really mind because it was easy enough to do, but it somewhat chafed since WaMu had free checking without all the small print.

A bigger annoyance was when I wanted to move some of the direct deposit money in my Chase account over to WaMu. Simple enough, right? I thought so too until I saw a $3 online transfer fee show up on my statement. Who charges for online transfer fees these days?!? I wrote customer service about that one but to no avail, they upheld the fee to transfer money between my Chase and soon-to-be Chase/WaMu account.

Today I went into Chase and mentioned this and they noted that transfer fees between WaMu and Chase had been eliminated at the end of January 2009 (maybe they really do read customer service comments).  A little too late for me, but a step in the right direction for the ChasaMu hybrid.

I was perfectly polite but I did mention to the Chase bank employees that their parent company really needed to enter the 21st century and look at such fees for transferring money online to other bank accounts. I was able to transfer money online through WaMu with little effort and no charges, so suddenly having to pay would be the end of my relationship with Chase.

Hopefully Chase isn’t counting on the fact that WaMu customers will stay with them simply because it’s easy. I was loyal to WaMu because they made my banking easy and free, but as far as I’m concerned I will be starting over with Chase. That is, if they can offer the same benefits. If they can’t, I may be starting over elsewhere.

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