After having several bank accounts with Bank Atlantic for 10 years or so, I abruptly found myself banking with PNC. Why? Bank Atlantic (being a South Florida company) sold their Tampa operations to PNC.
Back in late April or May, I began receiving a lot of mail from bothBank Atlantic and PNC. I had 3 accounts with Bank Atlantic, 1 personal, 1 for my Real Estate and another for an LLC I am a member of. I was receiving whatever mail these banks were sending regarding this change of ownership times 3! Gosh, it was a whole lot of mail.
In addition to the 3 bank accounts, I also had an HELOC (home equity line of credit) for a small amount that I used to cushion my accounts in case of overdraft. You see, I spend a lot of time away from Tampa in places where internet access is not readily available so the HELOC sort of covered my butt in case any of my scheduled bill payments were made before I could transfer money.
Well I sifted through all the mail being sent to me (some of which collected at home while I was out of town) and concluded that my HELOC was no longer going to be associated with my accounts after June 5th(the cut-over date). There were lots of letters regarding policy, bank account choices, deadlines, etc. I totally missed the fact that PNC was going to continue to honor whatever automatic bill-pay I had instituted with Bank Atlantic. That was my mistake. I think that when I read that the HELOC was not going to transfer I jumped to the conclusion that the automated bill payment was not either. BIG MISTAKE!
The numerous letters also repeated a umber of times that I would NOT have access to online banking until the cut-over date of June 6th.
I also have bank accounts at SunTrust Because several years ago, Bank Atlantic ceased handling certain kinds of money transfers of which my LLC depended upon. So, I found another bank that did and moved that part of my banking there. Thinking that my bills were not going to be paid by PNC and that I would not have access to re-establish automatic bill payments with them until June 6th, I went ahead and set up with SunTrust my most urgent bills for automatic payment.
Bright and early on Monday June 6th I logged on to my new PNC online banking and to my horror saw that they had paid a bill automatically. And, from an account that did not have enough money to cover it. With no HELOC it was an overdraft.
I drove to the bank branch I had always done business with to resolve this in whatever way necessary. The payment had not yet been delivered to the payee so I assumed (wrongly) that PNC could cancel it. NO, not possible I was told. They said that they could not do it until the payment actually processed, probably tomorrow and assured me that it would be cancelled. The next day, the bank called me and told me that I should have signed a dispute form while I was there so they could un-do the payment. I drove to the bank and after being questioned repeatedly by one of their staff about how the payment was originally set up (communication problem I suppose since my answer was the same to the question each time), they gave me the form to fill out. By then PNC had charged me a $25.00 overdraft fee. I asked them if they would reverse that and was told that they would but they couldn’t do it until the errant payment was taken care of. OK, it appeared all would be resolved.
Having heard nothing from the bank (either in writing or otherwise) I went about my business for the remainder of the week. On Monday morning a week later, I checked my online banking to see if the smoke had settled. If it had, I was going to deposit some money in my PNC accounts and begin using them. To my dismay I saw that not only had the debit been reversed but that the overdraft fee had not been reversed and another overdraft fee had been added. I immediately called the bank. The lady I spoke with told me that they could do nothing. I then asked to speak with with the manager and was told that he was busy but that he would call me back. It was the following day when he returned my call. He was rude, interrupting me repeatedly as I explained to him my situation. To literally add insult to injury, he also said that he had been told that I frequently had overdrafts. I asked him to repeat that and explain his statement to me. He than modified his statement to say that I had had overdrafts before. At that moment I couldn’t recall when or why. The next day I remembered that initially the HELOC only provided overdraft to one account and not knowing this, I scheduled some bills paid from a different account. Once the reason was understood (and it took several occurrences for the bank (Bank Atlantic) to realize what was going on) we added the account to the HELOC and never again was there an over draft. This manage also very arrogantly told me when I asked him to reverse the overdraft fees that why should he since I planned to close my accounts anyway. ????? I was dumbstruck and asked him what he was talking about.
This pompous ass (manager 1) assumed form my earlier statement to him that I had set up some bill payments in my SunTrust account that I had recently moved my banking to SunTrust planning to leave PNC. I told him how long I’d banked with Suntrust and exactly why (BankAtlantic being accused of and paying a huge fine (millions) for inappropriately handling monies and subsequently ceasing those sort of money “moving” processes. He shut up and then told me that he couldn’t make that decision because that particular account had actually been opened at the other Bank Atlantic account in town and that manager had to make that decision. He went on to say that he would call the other manager and see what could be done but that it would have to wait until the next day as it was too late to get a hold of him.
The next day (yesterday) Manager 1 called me and explained that since it really was not a bank error they would not reverse their charges and that the automatic payment would not be reversed either. Not that I care that the payee had now been paid twice, once from PNC and once from SunTrust, it’s the overdraft fees that bother me.
Today I checked online to see how much money I needed to deposit to wipe the slate clean and saw that additional overdraft fees were being charged.
I’ll be driving into Brandon shortly to resolve this once and for all.
I’m sure that this arrogent, pompus piss ant of a PNC branch manager can tell a different story but this is my story and I’m sticking to it!