Some Bank of America customers in Georgia must decide just how badly they enjoy getting monthly account statements in the mail—because the fee for this basic service has gone from $0 to $8.95 a month.
For now, the fee only applies to BofA customers with a certain kind of account—called an eBanking account, pitched as a self-service account—and only in Georgia. But, as American Banker reports:
B of A plans to roll out the product in other markets soon as a replacement for its popular student checking account, which has no monthly fees when opened online.
The “product” in question is an account in which customers incur an $8.95 fee monthly ($107.40 annually) for a service that most banks provide free of charge. The paper account fee is intended to make one of two things occur: Customers will either pay the fee (which brings in the bank new revenues) or they’ll opt out of the paper statements and view their accounts for free online (which saves banks the cost of mailing letters out every month). Either way the bank wins.
Unless, of course, it doesn’t, and a third possibility occurs: Freshly annoyed customers, who are aware they have plenty of banking options nowadays, may very well simply take their business elsewhere.