Finance comparison site Mozo has gathered up its review data over 12 months to award “People’s Choice” gongs to the best financial institutions and products. Perhaps unsurprisingly, online accounts rate the highest, while the Big Four (Commonwealth, NAB, Westpac/St George and ANZ) don’t score so well.
Bendigo & Adelaide Bank and Suncorp this week rolled out their joint ATM network of 2,000 machines. The useful upshot? If you’re a customer of either bank, you’ll get fee-free ATM access at rather more locations, an issue which is clearly dear to the hearts of many Lifehacker readers. [Bendigo Bank via ZDNet]
No-one likes getting slugged with a fee from their bank, but for our financial institutions they’re a $12.7 billion business. An analysis of bank fees by the Reserve Bank suggests that businesses are getting slugged more than consumers, and that loans are now a bigger source of fee income than day-to-day accounts.
It’s inevitable that as official interest rates drop, the amount you can earn on your savings falls — but that doesn’t mean that every bank adjusts their rates with the same ferocity.
Back in September, we pointed out that a new system to make it easier to switch banks (by speeding up the transfer of automatic payments) was in development. That scheme goes live this week, so if you’re looking for a better deal from your bank, the process should be a bit less painful. As Karen Dearne confirms at AustralianIT, the process still isn’t automated — you need to transfer a printed list of payments from your old to your new bank — but at least it’s a start. Full details of the scheme can be found on the Australia Payments Clearing Association site (PDF link). To find yourself a better bank deal, check out recently mentioned Mozo.
Switching banks easier from Nov 1 [AustralianIT]If you’ve been put off switching banks because you don’t want to have to mess around working out which regular payments need to get re-established, life’s about to get a little easier. Karen Dearne at Australian IT reports that from November 1, banks will automatically provide a printout of direct payments made over the previous 13 months, making it simpler to check you haven’t missed setting something up at your new bank. In these eco-conscious times, I can’t help wondering why the list couldn’t be sent in electronic form, but it’s certainly a step forward from leaving you to wade through your own records.
Switching banks made easy [Australian IT]Good money management is a mental exercise in self-regulation and focusing on the long-term goal, even when you’re sure you just can’t go on another day without buying that Kindle or MacBook. Even the most uber-organised and priority-minded people can stumble when it comes to money—how to save more of it, how to stop spending it, and how to keep doing both over and over again. While every person’s financial needs are different, anyone can set up simple systems to help themselves stop buying what they don’t need and almost automatically save money they’ll need later. Let’s take a look at 10 ways you can cut costs and do right by your money without much effort, after the jump. Photo by Darren Hester.
Talking to a bank call centre is even less fun than root canal work, so I think National Australia Bank might be onto something with its trial of a completely automated online chat support service. Simon Sharwood at the Smart Call podcast chatted with NAB’s head of direct channels Tim Cullen, and Cullen revealed that the bank has been trialling computer-based chat support. The IM agent has a growing knowledge base of common queries, but can hand over to a human support agent if it can’t work out what’s going on.
Fed up with your bank’s hidden fees and customer service? Before you make the often time-consuming switch to another institution, consider checking out BankSwitcher. The web app (in beta, of course) asks you to grab the financial data from your old bank in the popular Quicken or Microsoft Money formats, then upload it to BankSwitcher. The site generates a list of everything you’d want to do to keep your same set-up—automatic payments, transfers, bill pays, and the like—at your new financial digs. The site repeatedly assures users that it keeps secure servers and doesn’t commit unnecessary information like passwords or account numbers to the hard drive, erasing them from memory after the list is generated. If that’s good enough for you, it could help you get up and running with a new bank and saving yourself money and headaches. Thanks, Keith! BankSwitcher
US-centric: After just four weeks of their public beta, financial management web site Mint is already boasting over 50,000 members and managing over $2 billion of their money, and early next week Mint is launching several new features intended to improve its already impressive all-in-one money management tool. There’s no question that this snazzy web application deserves of much of its hype, but is it ready for your money?
