Title: What Can the Big Banks Do to Attract Small Retail Customers
Abstract: On September 29, 2011, Bank of America planned to charge its customers $5 per month for debit card purchases starting in 2012. JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo also planned pilot programs where customers would be charged for debit card use. The debit card fees appeared to strike a nerve with many depositors and fueled consumer outrage (Elise, 2011; Mui, September 29, 2011). For some customers, such a decision by a large national bank, which had been a recipient of TARP funding, appeared to epitomize rapacious corporate behavior. On September 30, Molly Katchpole, a 22-year-old working part-time jobs, initiated a petition on www.change.org for Bank of America to reverse its despicable decision. Within only four days, the petition collected online more than 100,000 supporting signatures. On October 4, Kristen Christian, a 27-year-old from Los Angeles, launched a Bank Transfer Day campaign, encouraging people to switch from commercial banks, in particular big banks, to credit unions, by November 5. Her Facebook page gathered 19,000 supporters in one day. Social media activists and consumers were not alone in criticizing the debit card fee decisions. Some advocates of the Democratic Party and the government (i.e., Secretary of the Treasury Geithner) shared the same outrage and argued that banks were unfairly treating their customers. Bank of America modified its fee structure in response to regulatory changes contained in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The new legislation included the Durbin amendment that regulated interchange fees that banks and credit unions charge merchants; when a consumer purchases with a debit card issued by a bank or a credit union, the merchant needs to pay the interchange fee to the issuing bank or credit union. Banks and credit unions with total assets over $10 billion dollars were subject to this amendment. The new regulation significantly reduced the revenue that financial institutions could obtain from debit card transactions. Before the regulation, the average debit card transaction fee was 44 cents, whereas the Durbin amendment capped the fee at around 24 cents. Effective on October 1, 2011, this rule was estimated to cost the non-exempt banks around $8 billion (Morrison, 2012; Shearman, 2011). The merchants appeared to be its beneficiaries since it would lower their costs. However, big commercial banks contested that the Durbin amendment unfairly restricted business freedom by fixing prices and would reduce market efficiency (The Banker Baiters, 2011). All but three credit unions were exempt from the Durbin Amendment, but the three non-exempt credit unions refrained from charging consumers debit card purchase fees. A credit union was a non-profit consumer cooperative and its membership was based on a common bond: the same employer, association, or residential area (Black & Dugger, 1981). Its members were its savers, customers, and shareholders. The credit union members shared equal voting rights and the profits. Exempt from federal taxes, it often offered higher interest rates to savers than a commercial bank. More importantly, the interest of its savers and that of its shareholders were well aligned. Therefore, it wouldn't serve a credit union's interest to increase service fees to its members. contrast, a commercial bank's savers were in general different from its shareholders. The debit card purchase fees may benefit its shareholders at the expense of the interest of its savers. Many credit unions took advantage of the popular outrage at big banks and attracted new consumers defecting from big banks. On October 28, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo decided to drop the plan to charge consumers for purchasing with debit cards. SunTrust Bank followed suit on October 31. On November 1, 2011, Bank of America announced, In response to customer feedback and the changing competitive marketplace, Bank of America no longer intends to implement a debit usage fee. …
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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