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Bank Of America Fees

March 1, 2012 by · Comments Off on Bank Of America Fees 

Bank Of America Fees, Bank fees are in the spotlight again. The Wall Street Journal reported that Bank of America is planning to roll out new checking account fees, and the news stirred up negative sentiment in the social mediaverse almost immediately, with consumers reacting angrily to the idea.

Chase, meanwhile, wants to charge customers even more than the $12 some of them are already paying each month. Following last year’s controversial (and ham-handed) attempts to implement debit card fees, banks are treading more carefully these days. But the latest news indicates that fees are going to remain a hot-button issue in the months ahead.

Bank of America spokeswoman Anne Pace says the fees reported by the Journal on Thursday are nothing new. Pilot programs going on in a trio of states are testing monthly account fees ranging from $9 to $25. “We have been testing in select markets for more than a year and plan to continue to learn from those tests,” she says via email. BofA isn’t commenting on a timeline for a broader rollout, and Pace says exactly how BofA will set up accounts and fees is still under consideration. “We have made no decisions on the construct of new product offerings,” she says.

The Journal cites an anonymous BofA source that says the new checking requirements could come in “a few months.”

But Pace does confirm one aspect of Bank of America’s plans. While the WSJ speculated that the bank’s bottom-tier checking account would come with a mandatory monthly fee that couldn’t be waived under any circumstances, Pace says that idea’s not on the table. “All our current and future accounts offer ways to avoid fees,” she says.

This may or may not be good news for consumers, depending on what those ways consist of. Last fall, with Bank of America and Chase embroiled in debit-fee disputes, Citibank announced it would not implement a debit fee and then debuted a new line-up of checking accounts with significantly higher minimum balance requirements for a customer to avoid monthly fees.

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