I'm planning to open a new chequing account in the near future, and I'm contemplating bailing on RBC. I've been with them for a very long time, and one possible outcome is that I'll just open a new RBC account and be done with it. That'd be... fine.
But for a variety of reasons (including my satisfaction with RBC trending steadily downward), I'm thinking about opening this new account elsewhere. I don't have a ton of hard requirements, and I'm not really sure what to look for in a bank, but the following would be nice:
- Good online banking experience, particularly desktop (RBC is shockingly bad at this)
- Good credit card; easy to make payments from the new account
- Minimal fees
- Easy e-transfers
- Real security (another thing RBC is terrible at)
- Neat rewards would be cool
- Low-fee, low-friction investing would also be cool-- I don't really do much investing, but I'd like to be able to
Any suggestions would be great, including anti-suggestions if you happen to know of a bank that I should avoid.
When I had my moment of questioning the banking situation, I discovered that credit unions in Ontario are regulated to be nonprofit. I chose one of the larger ones - Meridian - and opened an account. I haven't had a problem since. Every interaction with them has been pleasant. I also have an account with their subsidiary bank - Motusbank. I did that because I wanted to get a mortgage promo they offered. At the time of signing up with Meridian, their mortgage rates were lower than my employee mortgage rate at TD. Which makes sense. If there's no shareholders to funnel profit to, they can offer lower interest on loans and higher interest on deposits. There are no monthly fees. E-transfers are cheap. They're free with Motusbank. The web interface is simple and easy to use. It doesn't have a lot of features but it does well what it can. The mobile app is pretty decent too.
That's an idea that I hadn't really thought of. Do you know how credit unions work if you want to move to another province or something?
Credit unions are provincial so you just open a new account in the province that you moved to and you can e-transfer between the two accounts if you have payments in your original province.
I left my BC account open because of my car payments to the the credit union and transferred money to the BC account from my Ontario account with a different credit Union every month. When I moved back to BC, I closed the Ontario account after transferring everything back into my BC account.
You can deposit and withdraw from any other credit union ATM without fees across the country. The rates for mortgages can be a little higher than the banks but that is because they are smaller.