I’m planning to open a new chequing account in the near future, and I’m contemplating bailing on RBC. I’ve been with them for a very long time, and one possible outcome is that I’ll just open a new RBC account and be done with it. That’d be… fine.
But for a variety of reasons (including my satisfaction with RBC trending steadily downward), I’m thinking about opening this new account elsewhere. I don’t have a ton of hard requirements, and I’m not really sure what to look for in a bank, but the following would be nice:
- Good online banking experience, particularly desktop (RBC is shockingly bad at this)
- Good credit card; easy to make payments from the new account
- Minimal fees
- Easy e-transfers
- Real security (another thing RBC is terrible at)
- Neat rewards would be cool
- Low-fee, low-friction investing would also be cool-- I don’t really do much investing, but I’d like to be able to
Any suggestions would be great, including anti-suggestions if you happen to know of a bank that I should avoid.
I’d inquire at your local credit unions. Unless I had specific business needs, I’d never go back to a bank.
Credit Unions are really bad on the tangibles like locations, hours and range of products offered.
They are great for intangibles like not hard selling you on high management fee mutual funds or people that just want drop the call as quick as possible. Really just feels like you’re talking to a real human being trying to help you.
When I had my moment of questioning the banking situation, I discovered that credit unions in Ontario are regulated to be nonprofit. I chose one of the larger ones - Meridian - and opened an account. I haven’t had a problem since. Every interaction with them has been pleasant. I also have an account with their subsidiary bank - Motusbank. I did that because I wanted to get a mortgage promo they offered. At the time of signing up with Meridian, their mortgage rates were lower than my employee mortgage rate at TD. Which makes sense. If there’s no shareholders to funnel profit to, they can offer lower interest on loans and higher interest on deposits. There are no monthly fees. E-transfers are cheap. They’re free with Motusbank. The web interface is simple and easy to use. It doesn’t have a lot of features but it does well what it can. The mobile app is pretty decent too.
