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CardHub has launched a social networking site for personal finance called WalletHub, which allows users to review financial services companies, compare fees and get personalized financial news.
August 5
Poor disclosure practices make it difficult for customers to choose the bank that fits their needs, a new study of checking-fee transparency says.
The average checking account carries 30 different fees, and some have more than 50, according to a
Capital One (COF) and Fifth Third (FITB) are the only two banks that received perfect scores for transparency. Both banks either disclosed or did not charge all of the key fees that the survey assessed, made their fee information easily accessible and provided clear, short fee disclosures.
Of the 25 banks in the study, five did not make list of fees available on the checking-account product pages of their websites before a customer submits an application for a checking account. These five banks HSBC, Huntington Bancshares (HBAN), USAA Federal Savings, Sovereign Bank and M&T Bank (MTB) were the five lowest-scoring banks on the survey. M&T, which did not provide a schedule of fees anywhere on its website, scored lowest overall.
Other banks that received high scores for transparency were Citigroup (NYSE:C), Union Bank in San Francisco, Bank of America (BAC) and TD Bank.
A lack of uniformity in fee-disclosure statements makes it difficult for potential customers to choose the checking account that best fits their needs, WalletHub said. Last week,
WalletHub called the Pew guidelines helpful, but noted that even among the banks that had adopted the guidelines, many less-common fees, like wire-transfer and account-closure fees, are not disclosed.
WalletHub is a personal-finance social media website
