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.
I’d inquire at your local credit unions. Unless I had specific business needs, I’d never go back to a bank.
Credit Unions are really bad on the tangibles like locations, hours and range of products offered.
They are great for intangibles like not hard selling you on high management fee mutual funds or people that just want drop the call as quick as possible. Really just feels like you’re talking to a real human being trying to help you.
How about online banking? Do credit unions offer decent experiences, or is it largely an in-person experience?
(Great username btw)
Almost all credit unions (as well as small banks like Canadian Western Bank/Motive Financial) basically all use the standard platform offered by CentralOne, so there’s no difference. I love my credit union but the lack of compatibility with Flinks and Plaid creates frustrations sometimes (for connecting to Wealthsimple, etc.).