Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

They will however pass brutal laws sentencing poor people to 35 years to life for possession, an other disgusting shit like that, but that's another story.

In most countries jails are no good to prisoners. They are used to isolate people from society, not to help people to become a better person. And society is putting tones of money to support penitentiary system.

I believe for economical crimes people who took the decision should be fined a lot and banned from taking positions where they can do the same things again. No need to isolate them from society. At least for the first time. The same for other crimes where people do not hurt or threaten to hurt other people.

If you can simply fine it hard enough to make them stop cheating like that in future, that should be more than enough. Simple fines to make cheats unprofitable should do the thing.

Also the rule "to shutdown" the entire division might be misused on the wrong way or to blackmail the business. Once you shut down the division, it's much harder to reverse it, than simply to return a fine.

I like your concept of the multiple credit/card style budgeting. That makes a lot of sense. There are even some of those multicards out there with an e-ink display to select different cards. A bank could just issue one of those for a fee where you can select the account (and have a way to transfer money/items around if you select the wrong budget option).

Discover card has a section in your UI that tries to automatically break down your spending by store type (grocery, gas, etc.) but it does require you make all purchases with your Discover card, which a lot of people simply don't take.

1) http://www.simple.com

Heck not even real "Accounts" (in the traditional banking sense) but just "funds" or "virtual accounts." I should be able to put $5/month into a "waste of money" fund, and then flag specific transactions against that balance when I use it, or as you said have a virtual credit card that goes straight out of my virtual "waste of money" fund.

It really is surprising how little innovation occurs in the banking space. I want more tools to track expenditures and money usage, silo-ing money virtually is an obvious way to do that, but yet nobody really offers it!

I use Monzo which, a few month ago added support for 'Pots' - super lightweight mini bank accounts that let you partition up your money. Among others, I have a Holiday pot and a Savings pot. They even have this early stage feature where if you name a pot "Coin Jar" they'll automatically round up transactions to the nearest £ and transfer it to that pot.

Using something like Monzo is like night and day compared to the products from the big banks.

Also, many people use it without auto-import, but then you obviously have to be rigorous about entering in transactions. Anyway, it's an option.

It also doesn't hurt that they have good interest rates, no foreign expense costs, and don't charge for things like debit cards, checks, autodraft, bill pay, etc.

I do think they are USA only though. Not sure how it works for non US citizens.

Or simply for death. Not my idea, I first thought it was a joke when they told me, but it makes perfect sense. I get exactly zero interest for my savings, not even to compensate inflation. It's stock options or bs funds.

Only useful service I get is cards and avoiding keeping cash in a physical safe. Credit comes from cards or specialized loan companies.

There are two services that do matter: mortgages and credit lines for companies. I can see how this kind of volume operations could be also be done by specialized companies so generalistic banks could disappear.

Sadly, this is not how banks become rich. Banks become rich by letting their customers spend a lot of money they don't have, then charging them insane interest rates that will often result in them paying back multiple times what they originally owed.

Having moved to the US from a country where the idea of a credit card is close to inexistent (people take loans to buy a car or a house, or start a business - but certainly not to buy a TV), it took me a while to fully wrap my head around how insane the credit system was in the US, and how its only outcome can be very rich and powerful financial institutions leeching money from average citizens.

> I should be able to partition my money into several lightweight accounts - one for groceries, one for home expenses, investment, etc

You can open multiple checking accounts at most banks. I've made partitioned checking accounts like this before.

> automatically have fractions of my deposits sent to those accounts so my budgeting and money management are handled without any effort on my part.

Money transfers can be scheduled but they're usually by set amounts instead of fractions (e.g. add $100 on the first of the month). I use this myself.

> I should have lightweight cards available for each of those accounts with online card management (request/terminate cards, track per-card spending)

Should be able to open debit cards for each account but you'll probably need to be in person to request/terminate them. Maybe you could do it over the phone by authenticating yourself, not sure. I haven't heard of per-card tracking but at least you know what you spent on your card.

> multiple cards per account so I can give my wife full use of "grocery" card

You can tie multiple debit cards to the same account for a husband and wife. Try explaining what you're doing and a banker should set that up for you.

> alerts/notifications when I am spending too much in an account/not efficiently allocating the full amount/potentially using a card improperly

There are account alerts that can be set up for exactly this. I have it shoot me an email with the alert message when something gets triggered.

> financial projections

Account history can be downloaded in common formats like csv. There are already tools you could use to create the projection and do fancy data visualization things for yourself. You could scrape your account data periodically using your online banking credentials. Might be dangerous to automate though.

This part probably can reasonably be handled with a spreadsheet at home, so if you can't find a bank that supports it you can still get the benefits. Plus, that handles money that is not at your bank, too. For instance, many people prefer to use specialized firms for investments rather than their bank. For example, an index fund from Vanguard probably has lower fees than a fund using the same index from a bank.

> I should have lightweight cards available for each of those accounts with online card management (request/terminate cards, track per-card spending); multiple cards per account so I can give my wife full use of "grocery" card, and alerts/notifications when I am spending too much in an account/not efficiently allocating the full amount/potentially using a card improperly; financial projections; and so on.

I can't think of a good way to handle this at home without bank support, at least automatically. You might be able to do something using prepaid reloadable debit cards. E.g., you give your wife a prepaid reloadable debit card specifically for groceries, and you handle loading it from the grocery virtual account.

You can open multiple checking accounts (and we have multiples for those services that don’t draft from savings accounts), but we only have one debit card. All weekly expenses come from that account (which is funded every week by auto transfers).

We aren’t the type that care about “entertainment” vs “food.” Some weeks we eat out more; other weeks we play. If there’s cash in the spend account, buy what you want.

Savings and investments are automatically transferred as well. When we have a specific thing to save for, we open a new savings account and modify the transfer rules.

Not perfect, but works very well for us.

Then you can get a debit card for each of account and you can set your paycheck to deposited into each account with your company's payroll. Automatic transfers would work too. I do some budgeting per checking account, the joint account is for household bills. Savings is automatically deposited into my investments account too - did that with payroll.

Problem is some banks want fees per account or want you to jump through hoops to get the fees waived, but it's possible to get a no fee per account bank.

Youd be MUCH better off doing this with separate credit cards rather than separate bank accounts though for many reasons. Credit cards are big on account alerts - not sure if bank accounts really do account alerts, haven't looked into it. Just get a "grocery" credit card and a "fun" credit card, "bills" credit card etc. I, personally, have seventeen (17) credit cards.

I have a few other checking accounts with different banks, most of which are opened only temporarily, I churn bank account bonuses.

Unfortunately, getting data from bank accounts is a pain due to bank security. The approach I was going to use just to get started was to export Mint's data as a csv, and then build an app around that until I read up on the bank transaction formats that would let you pull your transaction history. Not ideal, though.

For sub-accounts, Capital One 360 is the easiest in terms of creating and removing accounts for specific purposes.

Most credit unions have this ability as well. I have accounts in two, and they use the same software platform that makes it easy to partition money in the way you describe. The only difference is that opening and closing sub accounts has only recently been available from the web interface.

Basically, there is no good reason to ever use a commercial bank, unless you have millions of dollars sitting around or handle a lot of cash and the convenience of a BoA or Wells Fargo has value to you for that purpose. Commercial banks will always be more expensive and less responsive.

My bank starling almost has this feature. It allows you to create "pots" which partition the money. However it is slightly more limited in that you only have one card and can only spend money that is not in a pot. You can however move money between pots instantly using the app (as well as many other useful features such as viewing/changing your PIN, and temporarily blocking/unblocking the card (useful if you lose it, but think you might find it again))

I agree it's a sector ripe for rebirth - it's an interesting time to be alive - we're living through a revolution comparable in scope to the industrial revolution, and industries like banking, which are primarily about storing and moving information, will be radically altered. Banking is one of the last to be touched.

https://ynab.com/referral/?ref=RhsyymvEwUvLaJTk (If you sign up with this link then we both get a free month.)

I do this today with my regular bank account that's with a big bank. I can open subaccounts, get cards for them (or student cards for young family members), have automatic transfers setup for the day after my check deposits, etc. All accounts are listed on my account summary page.

This works fine for me. As a bonus, there aren't any extra fees for the privilege of giving my bank credentials to a third party.

What I would personally like is an extension to the EFTPOS standard so that I can get receipts with my transaction history. It would be great if instead of just saying I spend $50 at the supermarket, it gave me itemised receipts which I could then export.

I have multiple "full" accounts, but there's no maintenence fees or anything. Their online tools are great. You can open a new checking account with the click of a button.

I'm eagerly looking forward to Silicon Valley disrupters getting into banking and, somehow, making it even worse.

I had an account with exactly this functionality ~18 years ago (sic!) in Poland already. All three bank accounts I have in Poland right now offer that - and I think it's the standard in the mainstream ones.

We need a complete overhaul of our society, starting with the banks.

Careful, if it's not actually closed they'll hit you with fees.

So, I mean, there are some good things to those pitches I guess. Wells Fargo is impressively awful.

This must vary by state; I recently took out a small loan from my local bank in Pennsylvania and the information I went home with came out to about 15 pages.

>When you're dealing with huge amounts of yellow tape and you have millions of customers

I thought the conventional wisdom was that onerous regulation actually favored huge businesses with "millions of customers" -- for example, the effort of having to "print that, audit it, have lawyers look it over, maintain it" is a fixed cost so the cost per customer is smaller for larger banks.

That is an advantage for big banks.

Insane setup/maintenance costs and low marginal costs disadvantages small banks or startups.

"“Having a bank, it’s a sign of economic vitality,” he says. And it’s not just North Carolina. He notes the country has about 40 percent fewer banks today than when the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, passed in response to the recession and implementing the most significant changes to financial regulations since the Great Depression, was signed in 2010.

Proponents of the measure said it would reduce the risk of another financial crisis by decreasing the concentration of resources in a handful of banks. Gwaltney says it’s done “the exact opposite.”

“The five or 10 largest banks in the country are larger than they were at the passage of Dodd-Frank,” he says."

[0] https://banksstreetpartners.com/news/what-happened-to-our-co...

What Obama should have done during the crisis is nationalize the failing big banks instead of bailing them out and then broken them down into a hundred little banks and sold them off.

Even my credit union can be a pain in the ass. I had a check made out to my wife that needed to be deposited immediately. She signed it over to me and I took it to the CU. She wasn't on that account so they wouldn't deposit it without her being there. I went right outside and forced it through the ATM, which didn't make such stupid demands.

Your second story is a textbook example of why you should never open credit/loan accounts with a bank if you already have checking/savings there. You lose all leverage in negotiating debts, since they'll just take what they feel is owed when they get fed up with your delinquency. Wells Fargo did that to me, but I've seen that right reserved at more banks than just them.

Why? Why not just have great customer service for the main bank?

These sub-brands aren't, AFAIK, aimed at better-off customers who are worth more (there are examples of that too - Santander has Cater Allen), so it's not like there's some greater payoff to decent customer service.

They are phone and online only, without physical branches, so there are lower costs. Perhaps it's that?

But beyond that, I think Chase does a pretty good job overall with in-branch customer service. Their online/mobile banking is great. They're the best big bank by far IMO.

Yes, my balance fluctuates wildly month-to-month. Travel.

Is it (even) worse in banking, or is this just something that happens to all companies above a certain size? I can totally see it being the case that a more heavily regulated industry suffers more, but that's pure conjecture.

Out of curiosity, if you care to disclose, what was your reasoning behind this?

If I'm a bank, I can see a couple of red flags with this (maybe some obscure kiting, or similar), "take five digit sum from account, in a check made out to self - then one month later deposit same uncashed check into originating account"... and "verifying the funds" is not verifying availability, but 'minimizing possibility of sketchiness'.

Check out Q2 and Malauzai in Austin (there are are several, these are just the two I have evaluated) for a stack that is agnostic of the core system and provides almost all banking functions across channels.

This kind of thing isn't cheap though, and bank boards are notoriously conservative when it comes to innovation, especially for small banks.

Ummm... Why not? There's plenty of accounts that refund ATM fees. I don't want to have to stop at the bank on my way out and i especially don't want to carry around more than $60 in cash. Especially in a foreign country!

https://co-opcreditunions.org/locator/

I always have a local bank just for the one time you need to go to a branch for something dumb once every ~5 years.

I really want to believe there's something better. But I think the real choice is between "local bank" -- shitty website, hard-to-use ATMs that require putting checks in envelopes, bad hours OR a big national bank, where you're a number, but the software is good, there are branches everywhere, they have a good mobile app/good ATMs, etc.

My personal philosophy has become, "I'm ok being a number because I'm pretty average personally, but I want a local bank for business banking." It's worked so far.

Okay, so pick any other bank which serves the entire community — whether it's a small credit union, a smaller regional bank, or a larger one which isn't BofA (I use TD Bank). The service will still be worlds better and they won't periodically require massive fraud prosecutions. It has nothing to do with the customers and everything to do with the corporate culture.

The reason I open and close so many accounts is churning the sign up bonuses.

I don't have faith in Wells Fargo ownership or leadership to ensure ethical or even legal behavior in the absence of sufficient incentives. The market as currently set up encourages large scale misbehavior and destructive abuse by Wells Fargo of its customers. The stockholders are insulated by distance from the misery their company causes, and the executives outright make out like bandits, even when they get caught.

This is ultimately a problem which can only be solved by voters and their representatives inflicting meaningful punishment.

Isn't that the point of voting?!? Why are our representatives pre-voting on bills to determine if they should even be argued, debated, amended and tried? I'm reminded of something one of my senators said last year about the Russia investigation (specifically the election interference, not "collusion"), in context of them not wanting to investigate because the facts were not known. THATS THE FKING POINT OF AN INVESTIGATION YOU DIPSH*T, TO FIND FACTS.

Everyone needs to vote this november. I don't care if you vote Republican, Democrat or any of the 3rd parties. Just vote. Get the old guys out. Disrupt their legacy. We (software developers) hate the Waterfall method. We like being Agile, whatever that means. Make our government operate the same way. Iterate in small, meaningful chunks.

So one of the agencies most likely to go after major corporations don't do this. But the police that go after the little people can? Seems... rigged.

This pattern can be seen everywhere...

1) politicians regulate an industry with the best intentions

2) industry becomes a safe haven for "the big fish" that can pay to play

3) Rinse and repeat for a while, creating bigger and bigger barriers to entry into the marketplace. Politicians are happy, mega banks are happy.

4) Megabank inevitably does something reprehensible

5) politicians slap them with some fines. Fake remorse ensues...

6) go back to step 1

The GAO has audited the CFPD, and verified the funds are being spent in accordance with the law.

Long story short, this all going into the Civil Penalty Fund:

In accordance with the Dodd-Frank Act and the Bureau's Civil Penalty Fund rule, the Fund can only be used for two purposes: to compensate eligible harmed consumers and, to the extent that victim payments are not practicable, to provide funding for consumer education and financial literacy programs.

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/payments-harmed-con...

Those who designed the agency were worried about precisely this kind of perverse incentive structure & required that it distribute all penalties back to consumers.

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/payments-harmed-con...

Someone pointed out to me once that the parable of the boy who cried wolf is a story where not only did he lie, he also laughed in their faces and mocked them for believing him. He gets eaten in the end.

Say it with me folks: Business aren't people. They're collections of people who run a a whole range of types.

(Obvious exceptions for 1-man shops/Freelancers)

You could try reading harder, or perhaps more carefully (and critically).

The same KeyBank who hit my account with $380+ in overdraft fees _in a single day_ when they decided after four years of seeing the same paycheck being deposited twice a month that it was "subject to hold"?

I thought that like 2 scandals ago... But they keep appearing on the news with more... Maybe they are not done airing out their dirty laundry.

Maybe we should have jailed the executives or responsible party, so no one dares to pull that kind of shit again.