-
Citizens Financial Group Inc. has agreed to pay $137.5 million to end a class action over its overdraft fees.
April 25 -
TD Bank has agreed to settle a lawsuit over its processing of overdraft fees for $62 million, the bank and plaintiffs' attorneys stated in a court filing late Friday.
May 11
RBS Citizens Financial Group and TD Bank have won tentative approval to settle a class-action lawsuit that charges them with imposing excessive overdraft fees on debit-card users.
The banks would pay a combined $199.5 million under the terms of two settlements that Judge James King of U.S. District Court in Miami approved preliminarily on Thursday.
As part of the settlements, Citizens, a unit of the Royal Bank of Scotland, would pay $137.5 million to more than a million people nationwide who have sued the bank to recoup the levies, while Toronto-Dominion's TD Bank would pay $62 million to hundreds of thousands of people in 15 states and the District of Columbia.
The court set hearings for March to weigh final approval of the settlements, which the parties proposed last spring.
King is overseeing litigation involving dozens of banks that allegedly bilked millions of debit-card customers who overdrew their accounts over roughly a decade beginning in 2001.
The lawsuits allege the banks charged the fees without alerting customers after reordering transactions from highest to lowest by amount to drive up the number of overdrafts, rather than process the transactions chronologically.
In 2010, the Federal Reserve
Citizens and TD Bank join a dozen other lenders who have settled the litigation. The Citizens settlement by would be the second-largest payout behind that of Bank of America (BAC), which settled its portion of the case in 2011 for $410 million.
