I imagine there are other reasons you value than time and space convenience. Why do you feel the physical trip is more valuable?
They typically only staff the drive-through when the bank lobby is also open, or a half-hour later. One of the lanes will also usually have an ATM and a dropbox for after-hours service.
I switched dentists for a similar reason; prior dentist kept a buffer of patients waiting to optimize their throughput. I had a dental appointment yesterday [at the newer place] and I was annoyed that I arrived 15 minutes early, because I know they make it a point to bring patients in exactly on time. Sure enough, 2:00 hits and I get called back.
Yea that way much slower and much less convenient compared to online banking.
About the only thing I'd do with a bank in person (other than ATMs) would be either special transactions--much of which you can handle over the phone or on-line these days--or if I still had to deposit sheafs of checks like I did when I had a business years ago. (Though I assume these days most people would pay digitally in some manner.)
I've observed over the past year that even brokerages and the like that pretty much used to require going into a branch have discovered that's actually not necessary.
I don't care so much about the speed of transaction logs but that I can access my records, pay bills, transfer money, etc. with a few clicks.
Here in the UK, the only time I've needed to step into a bank in the last 10 years is to have a meeting about my mortgage. Our online banking services are so good there's literally no reason to have brick-and-mortor banks for day-to-day tasks.
For me, not having to travel to a bank and wait in a queue to do basic tasks such as transferring money is such an advantage.
When I was young, after opening my first checking account, I fat-fingered a transfer from checking to savings online and the bank software interpreted this as me trying to transfer more than I had, so it happily proceeded to give me a large cash advance and then charge me $75 for the trouble, and another $35 for the NSF fee.
Now, maybe because I work in software, and maybe even moreso because I have literally written checking account software - I do not use online or mobile apps for non-trivial banking things. I call a person. Or I walk up to a person. I verify everything they are doing before they do it, and by acting as my agent during more complicated tasks they assume liability if they fat-finger something or mess something up (so far).
For the curious: the online form had separate inputs for dollars and cents, and some JS regex removed punctuation marks. So when I typed "1,0,period, 0, 0", instead of trying to transfer $10, it transferred $1000. I absolutely breezed through the "verify the amount step".
It would have been nice to have a notice pop up when they dropped the decimal, the same way so many forms do for the "invalid character" in my last name. (But I have no strong feelings on the subject whatsoever.)
I prefer going to bank if I have time.
Even the largest bank like Feds can have 3 trillion dollars operation error. https://thespeakernewsjournal.com/us/bank-wires-worth-trilli...
Knowing what I know and the kind of security that is in online banking does not bring any confidence in me.
I mean, go ahead and do what you want, but if checking recent transactions makes sense for online banking, it probably makes sense for offline banking too.
There's not functionality in there to shoot myself in the foot.
As another example with online banking switching banks effectively becomes zero friction. When Ally slashed rates it took a couple days to move nearly all funds out to a savings account with a much better rate.
Not to mention nearly all brick and mortar stores have savings account rates that are effectively zero. My first interest payment when I was a new Ally customer was basically what I got the entire ten year period I was at bank of america
Online banking also makes it very easy to manage my cards to ensure I'm never paying interest since the first interest payment usually totally eats up any savings from cash back.
It definitely is not. How is keeping track of random cash purchases in your head easier than a computer doing it for you automatically and instantly?
- being able to mange banking while traveling internationally (or to a state/province that does't have a branch)
- 30 second transfers between accounts (or to other banks)
- few minutes to open a new account
- see posted (and pending) charges within a day or two instead of a month (I regularly import for my budgeting software)
I'm a developer and actually do consider myself a little bit of a luddite. But online banking is helpful to me over traditional banking.
I didn’t say each point was of equal value or frequency. I was just trying to list some benefits for someone that asked.
It sounds "so karen", but it's very difficult to ask for a manager online, and very difficult to refuse in-person.
Honestly this is kind of blowing my mind. I've only been to the bank one time in probably a decade, and it was when I needed a $30k check to buy a car. Even my mortgage was done mostly over email (though they did send a guy out to have me sign paperwork.)
(No, I no longer do this. I'm just old enough to remember a time before online banking existed when the hot new thing was being able to check your balance via the automated phone system.)
Recurring payments (e.g. rent, internet, power etc...) are handled through automatic orders which I had setup once. For the very rare cases where I need to pay a bill "manually" there are service machines in the branch office's lobby, which is about 5 minutes walking distance from my home.
Here in Australia most banks have closed down branches in many smaller communities over the last 20 years.
Many of the 'standard' accounts that people have either only one in-branch visit per month, or none at all - and charge a fee for it.
Credit Unions and Building Societies are not much better, if at all.
There's also a growing number of online-only banks which don't have any physical branches, and all your interaction with them is online or over the phone.
You must live somewhere with an extremely temperate climate.
SUBTEXT: If you live somewhere with things like "snow" or "ice" or "Winter Storms" you'll change your tune once you begin to seriously worry how slowly you'd die after you break your hip on a sidewalk that's more snow-covered ice than concrete.
On the phone they couldn't even understand what I'm talking, ton of a security questions... I gave up.
I tried online and had some issues. Some code didn't work even if I had it saved.
Physical much more efficient. I can just relax 10m and get my things done just by saying 1 sentence