I'm gonna take you to the bank. To the blood bank!
We
have been quite unhappy with the Toronto Dominion bank. So I think that
this weekend we will just march there and close the account that my
wife has had with them since she was just a kid, saving her little
paper route money and birthday gift money there. Awww. We were happy to
use that account when we moved here and there was no problem at that
point (the money that we transferred from Finland came through just
fine), but after that they started a series of screwups. I'll be damned
that I didn't think of writing them down back then so that I could now
list them all in this blog for the amusement of my readers. But let me
at least yammer about the biggest hassles that I can remember at the
moment.
We reached the boiling point with TD a few years ago when we found out that our branch had done nothing with the RRSP cheques that my wife's employer was mailing them each payday. That's right, I literally mean that they had done nothing with these cheques. Much later when we happened to inquire about the current state of her RRSP account, we found out that this branch had just put these cheques on top of a shelf. The people handling the incoming cheques had had no idea of what to do with them, so instead of, you know, asking somebody or perhaps even contacting us for instructions they had just filed these cheques away, hoping that that will somehow make the problem solve itself.
At that point, despite my usual Cleveland Brown -style mild mannered nature and demeanor, we wrote an angry letter to the TD management, and received a reply that apologized profusely and asked us to contact this manager, but we didn't really bother to answer. If a financial institution really is that incompetent, there isn't much that you could possibly do. There had already been a long line of little problems before this giant whopper, so at that point we didn't feel like continuing this business relationship. We still kept our TD account, since we still had some GIC investments with them, and I shuddered to even think about how they might screw things up if the bank account happened to disappear.
Actually, what happened was that before a GIC matures, these guys will send you a letter that tells you that they will contact you to ask what they should do with that money. Note the future tense of the letter. But despite this wording, somehow this letter actually is this contact and they expect you to answer it, so that if you don't personally tell them that you want the money (which for some reason is not the commonsense default option) they will just keep this money in limbo. Anything for a buck, I guess.
Now that all our GIC's matured and the money therein has been put into better uses, we don't need to have a TD bank account any more. After the RRSP cheque screwup, we switched all our daily banking to President's Choice, a far better and more efficient bank that hasn't given us any crap whatsoever during all these years. They can even afford to pay interest for our money, since they operate inside the Loblaws grocery stores, the ATM's of the CIBC group and over the Internet, and thus don't have to maintain an expensive network of physical branches to serve a long line of cranky grannies who bring nothing to the bank but the dirt in their shoes, as one Finnish bank manager once famously put it. This is the future of banking, and when Wal-Mart will eventually be allowed to move to the banking and credit card business, watch out! That is one more layer of leeches made obsolete by technological progress.
Oh yeah, let me tell you another illustrative little story about TD. Last year we didn't receive the tax form for our GIC interest that they were supposed to mail us (somehow, I had already resigned in my mind for this not to happen), so I went there to ask for it. This is no big deal, since their branch is located in Square One shopping center that I often go to anyways, but it's still annoying. It turned out that their computer system was not smart enough to understand that if an account holder changes his address, the address of his investments should also similarly change. Well, this wasn't a big change to make. But when I asked the guy behind the desk whether the tax form that they had sent out had my SIN (same as SSN for Americans, or hetu for Finns) and DOB in it, he told me not to worry about it, since even if somebody finds out my SIN and DOB and other personal information, there isn't really anything that he could do with them.
I wish I was kidding, but he really said that to my face, apparently in all seriousness.
But this revelation certainly motivates me not to trust this bank to keep my personal information safe, so we ought to close our account just for these security reasons. And if this actually reflects the official policy of the TD bank, perhaps they could put their money where their mouth is and publish the personal information of all their employees on some public website, so we could find out what exactly somebody can do when they have somebody's personal information.
We reached the boiling point with TD a few years ago when we found out that our branch had done nothing with the RRSP cheques that my wife's employer was mailing them each payday. That's right, I literally mean that they had done nothing with these cheques. Much later when we happened to inquire about the current state of her RRSP account, we found out that this branch had just put these cheques on top of a shelf. The people handling the incoming cheques had had no idea of what to do with them, so instead of, you know, asking somebody or perhaps even contacting us for instructions they had just filed these cheques away, hoping that that will somehow make the problem solve itself.
At that point, despite my usual Cleveland Brown -style mild mannered nature and demeanor, we wrote an angry letter to the TD management, and received a reply that apologized profusely and asked us to contact this manager, but we didn't really bother to answer. If a financial institution really is that incompetent, there isn't much that you could possibly do. There had already been a long line of little problems before this giant whopper, so at that point we didn't feel like continuing this business relationship. We still kept our TD account, since we still had some GIC investments with them, and I shuddered to even think about how they might screw things up if the bank account happened to disappear.
Actually, what happened was that before a GIC matures, these guys will send you a letter that tells you that they will contact you to ask what they should do with that money. Note the future tense of the letter. But despite this wording, somehow this letter actually is this contact and they expect you to answer it, so that if you don't personally tell them that you want the money (which for some reason is not the commonsense default option) they will just keep this money in limbo. Anything for a buck, I guess.
Now that all our GIC's matured and the money therein has been put into better uses, we don't need to have a TD bank account any more. After the RRSP cheque screwup, we switched all our daily banking to President's Choice, a far better and more efficient bank that hasn't given us any crap whatsoever during all these years. They can even afford to pay interest for our money, since they operate inside the Loblaws grocery stores, the ATM's of the CIBC group and over the Internet, and thus don't have to maintain an expensive network of physical branches to serve a long line of cranky grannies who bring nothing to the bank but the dirt in their shoes, as one Finnish bank manager once famously put it. This is the future of banking, and when Wal-Mart will eventually be allowed to move to the banking and credit card business, watch out! That is one more layer of leeches made obsolete by technological progress.
Oh yeah, let me tell you another illustrative little story about TD. Last year we didn't receive the tax form for our GIC interest that they were supposed to mail us (somehow, I had already resigned in my mind for this not to happen), so I went there to ask for it. This is no big deal, since their branch is located in Square One shopping center that I often go to anyways, but it's still annoying. It turned out that their computer system was not smart enough to understand that if an account holder changes his address, the address of his investments should also similarly change. Well, this wasn't a big change to make. But when I asked the guy behind the desk whether the tax form that they had sent out had my SIN (same as SSN for Americans, or hetu for Finns) and DOB in it, he told me not to worry about it, since even if somebody finds out my SIN and DOB and other personal information, there isn't really anything that he could do with them.
I wish I was kidding, but he really said that to my face, apparently in all seriousness.
But this revelation certainly motivates me not to trust this bank to keep my personal information safe, so we ought to close our account just for these security reasons. And if this actually reflects the official policy of the TD bank, perhaps they could put their money where their mouth is and publish the personal information of all their employees on some public website, so we could find out what exactly somebody can do when they have somebody's personal information.
Comments