Fighting ATM Fees

All this talk about ATMs and fees has me shaking my head.
There was Jack Layton, standing on a frigid Toronto street corner last week, condemning the nation's banks for charging customers for using their ATMs.
Layton was damning the banks for charging customers who didn't have accounts with them – the competition's clientele – for using their ATMs. During his demonstration, he was using his Scotiabank Interac card to get funds out of a CIBC ATM.
Now, I'm no fan of the big banks. And I hate being ripped off. But even frugal old me can see why banks charge "outsiders" to use their ATMs.
If you take more than two minutes to think about it, it's obvious. It is in the banks’ best interest to make sure their customers are the ones who use their services. When a financial institution installs an ATM, it costs money – and every month they spend more to maintain that machine and rent the space it occupies.
Banks do not go through the trouble an expense of operating an ATM in order to serve the competition's customers. They do it for the convenience of their own clients (who finance the ATM by paying monthly banking fees, taking out loans, etc.).
This is big business, people. I have no idea how much it cost CIBC to grease their way into 7-11 stores (and a lot of gas stations, too!) but I know this much: it wasn't cheap. But it was all in the name of marketing.
Banks scatter ATMs throughout the urban areas in effort to get Canadians to bank with them. If there were 20 Caisse ATMs compared to 3 RBC ATMs in my neighbourhood, I would likely want to bank with Caisse. Why? Because as an active consumer, I know that if I'm a RBC customer and I keep on having to go to Caisse ATMs, those “convenience fees,” or 'non-resident service charges' as I prefer to call them, would soon add up.
When selecting a bank – and to a lesser extent, an ATM – we as consumers should take the time to weigh the options.
Many banks charge customers $20 or $25 a month just to have an account with them. Some charge nothing. And that's why it's important to shop around.
The bank I use doesn't charge me anything to have an account with them – and I have three accounts. I also get free cheques, unlimited use of their affiliated ATMs and can make as many debit card purchases as I want.
But in exchange, I do not get a lot of the premium services offered by other financial institutions.
I didn't read my service agreement thoroughly, and once deposited a U.S. cheque for a few thousand dollars into my account. As a result, I had the deposit, along with the equivalent amount that had already been in my account (ie: twice the deposited amount) frozen for 60 days. It was terrible, but I brought it on myself. Since my account had essentially been frozen, I borrowed money from a friend to pay my bills and learned my lesson.
If banks were forced into providing free ATM services to all customers, mark my words, we'd see a decrease in the number of bank machines.
And when the big banks move out, you know who'd move in? Those annoying privately owned and operated cash machines that charge everyone anywhere between $1.25 and up per transaction. You’ve surely seen them in bars and restaurants, or a shopping centre. The financial industry calls them “white label” machines, and apparently they already make up about three quarters of all ATMs in Canada, (bank-owned ATMs constitute 31 per cent of the
I don't think there's anything wrong with banks charging other banks' clientele to use their ATMs.
Instead of targeting these fees, we should be looking at banks who charge their customers to use their debit or Interac cards to make purchases.
When you pay by debit, the funds are transferred directly from your account to the store's account. If you don't have the cash, the machine says so and your transaction is declined. There's no credit involved; a debit transaction is essentially a cash transaction.
That's why it's silly for some banks to charge their customers for using their debit cards to make purchases. (Though is mildly effective at encouraging us to spend less or not make that impulse buy).
Depending on what sort of account you hold with what bank, all of your debit transactions might be free, or you might have a certain number of free transactions allowed per month, then be subject to a set fee for every transaction above that limit. Or, you might have to pay each and every time you use the card.
And that, my friends, is crap.
But is it up to Mr. Layton or Jim Flaherty to enforce? Perhaps... but before that, the onus is on us, the lazy public, to do our homework, and literally put our money where our mouths are.
If your bank charges you ridiculous fees, or doesn't have convenient ATM locations, take your business elsewhere.