Understand your point, but if I was a customer there is zero chance I am investing a cent with them.
My thinking is if they do this with Citibank and a hundred million, I have no confidence in being able to recover my own money in case of a dispute.
My thinking is if they do this with Citibank and a hundred million, I have no confidence in being able to recover my own money in case of a dispute.
In 2018, I was laid off, lost almost everything over five months. I had one bill on autopay that I eventually ran out of funds to pay. IIRC in June 2018, WF stopped denying repeat ACH attempts if, on the first two attempts, the funds were not available and/or WF would not choose to pay it and simply overdraw the account. Every single attempt would now process. On December 3, my account was at $490 when the $600 payment attempted, then again, and again, over and over, for 9 business days. My account was closed with a -$1,800+ balance. I lost count of the number of NSF fees by day four or five. And Wells Fargo decided to pay that payment upon closure of my account. So, I went from $490 on December 3, 2018, to owing almost $2,000 in fees to Wells Fargo two weeks later.
I'll pay it off when I can, as you know, it's still my debt, but while other banks were cutting fees, WF was changing its policies to ramp them up. I ended up in an unfortunate waltz of financial doom with them. And I had a low statistical risk of running into a problem with them because I used so few of their services. Don't leave it up to luck. When you see risky behavior, grab your money and go. They're willing to keep doing crap like this because they know most people think it would never happen to their personal accounts.
Turns out her mother had been depositing the $50 each week automatically until she was about 17, but was also randomly over the years withdrawing nearly all of it. And at the time she went in, she was -$240 on the account, and they wouldn't allow her to close it until that was paid off, and they were going to continue feeing her $20 each month for having less than the required amount. By the time we finally had the income available to close the account it had accrued around $1000 in fees.
And yet, for some stupid reason, I am still with Wells Fargo today, 15 years on...
Why?
I hate to rub salt in your wounds, but they have demonstrated that they are unworthy of your business. Acting on this would play a small part in forcing them to either change, or else go out of business.
If it were me in your shoes, the amount of raw spite I would feel for Wells Fargo would be difficult to exaggerate.
Long ago I stopped all auto payments from my checking account. I do the old fashion thing of paying each bill every month on a schedule. I don't really send checks, it is all via bill pay and I can schedule them out in advance so I only really do this twice a month.
Edit: And this is not $500 BILLION so you can say, F it, boom or bust, let's try it. The upside isn't that much, relatively speaking, considering the blacklisting downside. Even if Revlon doesn't pay, a large % is already banked or will be in bankruptcy proceedings so it's not a 100% loss.
Edit: That is if it is a legitimate error-error not citibank try to pull a takesy-backsy.
What kind of duty? Not a legal one, I think.
It's like a natural process to these companies. Most likely CITI is getting it back. But it's probably a worthy gamble on the lawyering fees.
Frankly, the entire chunk of money should be considered legally tainted until legal action is resolved; which means escrow it somewhere and unleash the lawyers.
All of a sudden, we may see some consideration given to proper verification ( not just quick rubber stamp ).
Even if Revlon goes under because the courts pull what I'd call a derp, it should create the illustrative case that creates a business niche for higher reliability/risk financial transactions.
I used to think that this kind of repuational thing meant something. I pick Don as one of many examples just because he's literally gone on from that situation to become the president. Banks need to make big loans. If they make you a big loan, they owe you - go go broke it matters to them. You and me, nah. They'll burn us in a heartbeat when we're financially responsible without much reputation damage to the banks either. Reputation, it's not worth anything. And that is a sad, sad realisation and do not relish sharing it.
Conversely, Warren Buffet famously has a "halo" which means he gets favorable terms because people know that doing business with him will reflect well on them.
Different pockets of finance have different norms about who it's OK to screw and how, and even as an investment professional I don't understand the conventions in areas outside of my specialty. So it's very hard to judge as an outsider what is considered unethical and reputation-destroying, and what is considered aggressive business practices that happen to come at the expense of other sophisticated professionals.
You and me would have a lot of trouble getting that kind of financing without a hideous reputation. Don has one and got it. Now he's even the president. Bad reputations count for not all that much at all. And I hate that, fwiw.
Buffet's reputation, now that's a whole nother discussion. Yes it deserves to be better than Don's. Coke, McDonalds and buying off-market at huge discounts to support management against shareholders. Obesity, diabetes and legal resdistribution of people's retirment savings to berkshire hathaway. Yes, a reputation too good to be true nonetheless. I agree.
So have George Soros and Carl Icahn.
We would likely be guided by a sense of personal ethics and our own values, which would make us consider returning money even if through a technicality we had the legal right to keep it.
At the level these companies are interacting at, there's no such thing as ethics of this kind. The legal system is the values system, and if they can make money on a legal technicality they'll do it without further thought.
They're more like great vampire squids wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming their blood funnels into anything that smells like money, as someone more eloquent than me once noted.
Worth remembering if you find yourself dealing with large scale financial institutions.