Like most small business owners, Belinda Young doesn't have surplus cash lying around. Clients of her public relations firm are often as slow to pay as creditors are prompt to collect, so it's important to this home-office entrepreneur that her bank deposits are recorded as soon as they're made. If only life was that predictable.
"Wells Fargo just lost a deposit of mine for the third time since August," reports Young. "The latest was a transfer made from my business account to my personal account. It wasn't posted until Tuesday even though my confirmation number indicated that it should have been posted on Monday."
Most folks wouldn't know this until checks started bouncing. But Young gets on her PC at the end of every business day to check her account balances at her different banks. She noticed right away that Wells Fargo hadn't transferred funds to cover her Citibank credit card payment that was due, and she was on the phone to customer service five minutes later. Young was able to get the deposit logged and keep a not-sufficient funds (NSF) memo from going to Citibank.
She isn't happy about the half hour she spent on the phone with Wells Fargo at 8 p.m. or the extra interest charges she incurred on her Citibank credit card. But at least she avoided bounced-check charges from Wells Fargo and her other creditors.
"Without online banking, says Young, "I would have been charged $21 for each check not covered, and I would have been explaining it to Wells and my vendors for a month."
Young knows the drill. She used to bank with First Interstate Bank before it was swallowed up by Wells Fargo. She once racked up almost $100 in NSF fees when First Interstate failed to post an ATM deposit in time. She figures online banking has saved her the price of her PC-based personal financial management software many times over.
Who Needs Online Banking?
Modern life is complicated, and finances-business or personal-are never easy to manage. Online banking and bill paying can help. Although expensive and clunky versions of cyber banking have been around for more than a decade, these services first became cost effective and easy to use at the end of 1994, when they were offered in conjunction with personal finance managers: Microsoft Money, Intuit Quicken, and Managing Your Money, which is owned by a consortium of banks. During the past several months, the top two double-entry accounting programs for small to mid-sized businesses-Intuit QuickBooks Pro and Peachtree Complete Accounting-have also jumped on the online banking bandwagon.
Although online banking isn't widespread yet, it's growing fast, especially among consumers. New York City market researcher Jupiter Communications reports that at the end of 1997, only 4.5 million American households used online banking. That's less than five percent of America's 100 million or so households. But that's a 78 percent jump from the previous year, and Jupiter expects the total number to reach 18 million by 2002.
On the institutional side, online banking is starting at the top and filtering down. According to Intuit's surveys, the nation's 100 largest financial institutions, representing an estimated 100 million of America's 160 million checking accounts, have been the first to embrace electronic banking. Perhaps because of the up-front investment required, smaller institutions have been slower to adopt PC banking, at least through Money or Quicken. Still, many do offer some form of electronic statement downloads, account transfers, and balance updates via proprietary software, the Web, or online services like AOL.
Meanwhile, electronic bill paying has long been available to virtually anyone with a checking account. Bill paying services are available through banks and through third-party services such as CheckFree, which banks usually employ behind the scenes.
These services do require some initial effort. You need to sign up with the bank or bill paying service, set up the appropriate software on your PC, and so on. For more on the gory details, see the "Getting Started" sidebar on page 64. However, the payoff is greater control over your money. When used in conjunction with a good personal finance or accounting program, online banking services let you stay on top of the jumble and sidestep some of life's expensive little surprises. These include not only charges for bounced checks, but the growing number of bank fees being levied for seemingly everything but using the water fountain.
Taking Control of Your Money
Online banking isn't hard to learn, either. Programs like Quicken and Money, and the interfaces of most banking Web sites, intentionally duplicate the look and feel of the paper checkbook registers and bank statements you've used all your life. It's just that online records don't crumple, smudge, get lost, or pile up. There's no need to add and subtract numbers on a calculator or keep records by hand. The software does the math for you, and its registers and reports make it easier for you to stay in touch with your accounts and transactions. Little automated tricks in financial programs, like remembering the names of past payees and alerting you to recurring payments, can save you a lot of repetitive data entry on the front end. And as Young's experience shows, these programs can save you a lot of time and money on the back end when those inevitable bank errors land on you. What's more, when you download account information to your PC, you accumulate the volumes of raw data you need for various other aspects of financial management such as budgeting, investing, planning your retirement, and filing tax returns.
Then there's the convenience of banking from home whenever you feel like it as opposed to during bank hours. You can check your account balances at your various banks, make interaccount and interbank transfers, make deposits by mail, and whittle away at that pile of bills on your desk any time of day or night. Overall, you should be able to slash the number of trips you have to make to a bank branch or ATM during the day. This might also save you money, since these trips are increasingly costing $1 to $2 or more a pop.
Online bill paying won't gain you any float (the time between when a check is deposited and when it is debited) with your creditors, but it won't lose you any either. Depending on the type and size of the creditor, payment processor CheckFree requires you to post your payment from three to five days prior to its due date. You're automatically notified of the projected arrival date of your payment when it's posted. Electronic transfers between banks and large retail institutions take the least time. Checks that are printed and mailed to small businesses and individuals take the most.
You still have the opportunity to time a bill's arrival. You just have to schedule it, and all of the programs mentioned above have features to remind you when recurring transactions (the vast majority of all transactions) are due. You also can set up certain payments to arrive on a predetermined schedule every month without your intervention.
Because electronic bill payment is not yet the norm in America, you may still encounter the rare vendor who can't seem to credit a payment correctly unless you return the company's payment stub along with your mailing. Or you may just need or want to write a check on the fly by hand. You can still do that. Your paper checks will have a different number series than your electronic ones. The data for both series will be downloaded during online banking sessions. Checks written by hand will not have the payee's name downloaded, but all of the other information-check number, date, amount, expense category-will flow easily into your program's account registers. Typing in the name of a handwritten check's payee is typically the most onerous part of data entry after you switch to online banking.
Late adopters can probably continue to resist going online for quite a while. But as cyber banking becomes the norm, people banking the old-fashioned way will be like those who stuck with DOS after Windows stormed the PC platform, or like rotary phone users who never learned to navigate touch-tone answering systems. In other words, if you don't sign up for electronic banking, you're in for a lot more hassle.
Convenience Versus Fees
But what about fees? Doesn't online banking cost you more? In most cases, yes. On average, electronic banking or bill paying for a consumer (as opposed to a business) costs $5 to $6 a month or around $10 a month for both. Many banks will give you one or both online services for free, however, depending on the types of accounts you have, the companion services you opt for, daily balance requirements, and all that other banking mumbo jumbo. Some particularly aggressive institutions will even toss in a free checking account or a copy of Quicken or Money for good measure.
Granted, it's annoying to have to pay the bank anything when online banking actually helps the bank as much as it helps you, by cutting paperwork and reducing the number of times you use a teller, ATM, or automated phone service to check on your accounts. And the fee structures can be byzantine in their complexity (see the table "Consumer Online Banking Fees: Ifs, Ands, and Buts" on page 60). But the average consumer will recover the monthly service charge just in the dollars that would otherwise be spent on stamps and envelopes.
One of the best deals is Union Bank of California's Bank@Home service. Deposit a minimum of $100 to open a free Union Bank checking account and you get both online banking and bill paying free for a year. Union will even deposit $50 in that checking account so you can buy your own software. If you already have the software, you can enjoy a small windfall.
Hurdles to Online Banking
But who has the time to switch his or her financial management over to the PC? Microsoft research shows that the major reason people give for not using personal finance software is that they don't want to enter all their financial data into the computer.
"That is clearly the major barrier to entry into this category," observes Microsoft business development director Thaddeus Westhusing. What's more, he adds, people are concerned that online banking and bill paying will cost more than traditional methods. Still others feel their finances aren't sufficiently complicated to require management. But according to Intuit's research, the average American has more than seven accounts to juggle at two different institutions, including three credit cards, maybe a mortgage, and 10 to 20 bills a month. And have you ever thought about how much time it takes to keep up with your accounts the old-fashioned way? It's not like your checking account is going to balance itself. You still have to work with your calculator, paper bank statements, and account registers on a regular basis.
But merely conducting your banking business and paying bills online is not the same as managing your finances with a software program. Yes, many banks large and small maintain their own Web pages where you can check account balances and make transfers. (Can you say "s-l-o-o-o-w?") You also can use Intuit's BankNow software on America Online for transactions only. (Can you say "s-l-o-o-o-w" again?) But even after you've waited for various Web servers to do their things, you still have to import your transaction data into your personal finance program, or keep track of it by hand in checkbook registers and handwritten budgets. On the other hand, downloading financial data to Quicken or Money usually takes less than a minute, and is the quickest way available to perform everyday financial tasks like recording bank and credit-card transactions and balancing accounts.
And maybe the transition won't be so hard. Most banks will load one to three months' worth of back data into your Quicken or Money account registers automatically. With additional data downloads over time, your paper registers will become archival records. Of course, despite the long-term advantages, there is still a small, up-front investment of time required to change over. That's why users of personal finance programs and electronic banking are a distinct minority at the moment.
Minding Your Own Business
Small businesses face the same basic problem consumers do: They don't have enough time to manage cash flow properly.
To give you an idea of how powerful a personal finance program can be, according to Intuit, some 3 million home-based businesses use Quicken as their primary accounting tool. But business transaction volumes are usually greater, and so are your problems if you don't keep up with your debits and credits. If you need to track a fairly high volume of transactions, create invoices, keep a payroll, and make regular tax contributions, you're better off with a good double-entry accounting program like Intuit's QuickBooks or Peachtree Complete Accounting for Windows. They are remarkably easy to use (not that you'd want to experience double-entry accounting unless you had to) and they can help you keep your finger on the pulse of your enterprise without taking too much time away from those activities that bring dollars in the door.
Graham Ray, co-owner of Burlingame, Calif.-based Deep Root Partners, turned to Peachtree Complete and online banking so he could get a better handle on his payables and receivables.
"Before this, we were frustrated that we couldn't reconcile our accounts on a day-to-day basis," says Ray, a Union Bank customer. "We'd get several money wires in from overseas that we wanted to confirm and have access to as soon as they came in. That necessitated a call to the bank, which would take 10 minutes, and the rep would never know who had the information we needed. Online banking has enabled us to make better decisions faster."
A manufacturer of underground tree root barriers, Ray must control inventory as tightly as cash flow. He has to be careful not to invest too much cash in inventory but always have enough on hand when customers call. Ray uses Peachtree to monitor both his financial and physical resources several times a day.
What he doesn't have time for is the repetitive data entry. With manual bookkeeping, you usually end up copying the same names, addresses, and account numbers of largely the same vendors and employees into different checkbook registers, journals, tax forms, and other pieces of paper, month in and month out. But with Peachtree or QuickBooks, you only have to enter this information into your PC once to be able to apply it to many different purposes.
Banks Slow to Offer Business Services
Unfortunately, banks have been much slower to hook up with QuickBooks and Peachtree than they have been with Quicken and Money. Fewer banks offer online services for small businesses through these programs. Those that do usually levy higher charges for business accounts. For example, Union Bank of California offers consumers using Quicken or Money a year of electronic banking and bill paying for free and will even chip in $50 to help them meet the $100 minimum balance for its standard checking account. But Union charges business customers using QuickBooks Pro $9 a month for both online banking and bill paying during the first year and $14.95 monthly after that. The table "Business Online Banking: Ifs, Ands, and Buts" on page 45 offers further details. Small or home-based business with a low volume of transactions may qualify for a consumer checking account, which is usually the best deal.
Even so, electronic bill paying still beats the old-fashioned lick-and-stamp method of bill payment. That's because the most expensive part of the process is your own labor. According to a survey by Peachtree parent Automatic Data Processing (ADP), a small company writing about 100 checks a month (not counting payroll checks) is putting out almost $2.50 per check in paper goods, postage, and employee time. Businesses writing fewer checks may be paying as much as $2.81 per check.
Peachtree's electronic bill paying through ADP should cost you around $1 per check, depending on your monthly volume. Online bill paying through banks that use services like CheckFree is cheaper, but since not all banks currently support banking and bill paying from within QuickBooks or Peachtree, you may have to import your data into these programs.
There is no way a business can keep up with its cash flow or have the data to properly analyze its opportunities if it has to wait 45 days between bank statements to find out which checks have cleared and how much money is left for bills. Calling the bank and punching a lot of numbers into a telephone dial is not an efficient alternative, either. With online banking and bill-paying, you can get all of this critical business information 24 hours per day, seven days per week in one 60-second download. That leaves you more time to analyze your business and engage in the activity that, presumably, is the reason you went into business in the first place-to make more money.
Bank Mergers Change the Rules
No one wants you to bank online more than your bank. Offering these services is part of a long-term strategy for staying competitive over the next decade, says banking analyst Michael Moebs, chairman of Lake Bluff, Ill.-based Moebs $ervices, a firm that assembles bank data for the Federal Reserve Board. It's also the result of a sea change in banking since the government began deregulating this and other financial service sectors in the early 1980s. The change is both good and bad news for consumers, says Moebs.
The bad news is that deregulation has set off a wave of mergers like the recent one between San Francisco-.based Bank of America and Charlotte, N.C.-based NationsBank. The trend is to replace many small to medium-sized banks with interstate behemoths. Many local branches are being washed away in the process. According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the number of discrete California banking institutions has declined 30 percent, from 484 in 1991 to 339 by mid-1997. Banks in the state have closed more than a quarter of the 5,900 or so branches they had in 1991. At the same time, California bank profits rose by a factor of eight, from $601 million in 1991 to an estimated $5.71 billion in 1997.
The corollary to mergers is that larger, more powerful institutions are better able to raise fees on everything from bounced checks to money orders. They're also able to institute new charges that tend to rein in many of the traditional bank services you used to get for free, such as teller visits, ATM withdrawals, and "excessive" use of bank-by-phone services. For instance, Bank of America, Union Bank, and other California banks are following the lead of their cousins all over the country by charging you after a certain number of visits to their tellers or calls to their phone services each month. In fact, Bank of America charges customers of its popular Versatel checking accounts $2 for any visit to a teller. Also, if you aren't already paying to have your bank return your checks to you, consider yourself lucky. The days of that free service are numbered.
Bank Fees Go Nowhere But Up
In addition, Moebs reports that the average bounced-check fee is now $20.45 at banks with more than $1 billion in assets, but $18.73 at mid-sized banks with $100 million to $1 billion in assets. NSFs average only $15.01 at small banks with assets less than $100 million.
No doubt you've also felt the pinch of ATM fees since Visa International and MasterCard electronic clearing agencies began allowing banks to charge for these in April 1996. Charges for ATM transactions have risen 64 percent since 1994. Fees on interest-bearing checking accounts rose 40 percent during the same period, according to a recently completed study by the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), a Washington, D.C.-based consortium of 240 proconsumer groups.
Overall, the FDIC says annual income from fees rose 14 percent for all American banks last year to an estimated $18.6 billion. But it rose slightly faster in California, where an 18 percent fee increase led to an estimated $2.61 billion income boost for banks by year's end. Incidentally, according to the FDIC, fee income for California banks has increased 42 percent since 1991.
"Given their record of profits of the past several years, banks should charge lower fees instead of complaining about credit unions (whose fees are typically lower than banks')," asserts Daniel A. Mica, president and CEO of the Credit Union National Association. "They could bring fees down to credit union levels and still earn healthy profits."
Maybe, but don't hold your breath, Mr. Mica. If you were a banker, you'd be nuts to change this winning formula. Anyway, the numbers above don't fully illustrate the impact service charges have on banks' bottom lines. Fees comprise only a fraction of banks' total income. But as the profitability of loan portfolios becomes less reliable in a deregulated marketplace, Moebs says, banks are pinning more of their profit hopes on service charges.
"Fees represent 80 percent to 90 percent of after-tax profits for banks these days," he says, "and fees will continue to be important in the future."
Online Banking Is Your Best Weapon
But there is some good news. Online banking and bill paying, which Moebs calls "anomalies in the system," are services that banks are willing to price below cost just to get you involved.
"It's just like with ATMs 30 years ago. Bankers are losing their shirts on PC banking," says Moebs. "But they're willing to do it because they feel they can make money if they get online banking volumes up."
It doesn't take a banking genius to realize that the more people use online banking, the fewer in-person services banks will have to provide. But the real payoff for banks will come in future years as they begin to squeeze float out of a system that processes millions upon millions of transactions a year. Not surprisingly, the largest banks with the most transactions and marketing aspirations across state lines have been the quickest to invest in electronic banking.
Banks want you to move into the electronic age so badly that you can expect them to be willing to lose money on these services for quite a while, says Moebs. Besides, they can always make up a lot of that investment by nickel-and-diming you on every other type of service. But only if you let them.
"Apart from banking at a credit union, the two most important ways consumers can lower checking fees is to meet minimum balance requirements and avoid bouncing checks," concludes CFA executive director Stephen Brobeck.
That's the second part of the PC banking opportunity: You can use these services to manage your finances better and avoid the punitive charges banks have in store for the less-than-nimble. Of course, the onus is still on you to keep your accounts straight. But electronic services are the tools you need for the job. They're on the crest of the wave that is sweeping banking, and for good or ill, it's better to ride that wave than drown in the fees it is creating.
One Family's Financial Revolution
"I never go to the bank," brags Gavin Cooley, a father of five in Spokane, Wash. Cooley is a customer of Seafirst Bank, a subsidiary of California's giant Bank of America.
"My deposits are made electronically, all our bills are paid electronically, and bank fees are a nonissue for me except for ATMs. It seems like I get dinged $1.50 every time I go to one of those things, so I avoid them like the plague." He quickly figured out that it's cheaper to get his cash at the grocery store.
Another reason Cooley prefers online banking is that he likes to keep close track of the family budget in Microsoft Money. Also, during online banking sessions, more tax and category-related information for that budget comes down for credit and debit cards than for ATM transactions.
"When you go to an ATM, it's just cash coming out and who knows where it goes?" says Cooley. "When I use my credit or debit card at the market, the payee is listed and it's a memorized transaction. This helps keep my budget up to date."
Trained as a CPA, Cooley is treasurer and chief financial officer for North Coast Life Insurance Company in Spokane, so you can assume that he is somewhat handy with a calculator. But like most of us, he rarely balanced his checkbook before PC banking. Instead, he made periodic transfers from his line of credit into his checking account to avoid NSFs, an expensive alternative considering the interest charges.
"Before I [started banking online], I would balance my checkbook every four or five months," recalls Cooley. "But it leaves you with this feeling of not really knowing what's going on, and it's very difficult to accumulate wealth when you aren't keeping track. You're operating in a vacuum. You could double your salary and it wouldn't make a difference because you spend everything you make."
The crunch came when Cooley's tax accountant told him that he needed to start putting a large sum into a 401(k) plan every year. In order to squeeze out those extra dollars for savings, the family needed to create a budget and stick with it. "All of a sudden, we had to come up with thousands extra," says Cooley.
He began by using the free copy of Quicken that came with his Gateway computer. About a year ago, he switched to Microsoft Money to track the 100 checks and credit card transactions the family downloads every month. Cooley pays about $10.50 a month for banking and bill paying. "Considering that 90 percent of the bills I send out are done this way now, I easily save that in stamps," he says.
Before PC banking, it would take Cooley hours to catch up when he finally did sit down to bring his checkbook up to date. Now, he has his 14-year-old son take care of that little bit of family housekeeping.
As Cooley points out, you can't create a forward-looking budget or figure out how you're doing with it unless you keep up with your day-to-day spending. "I can't imagine sitting down and trying to do a budget by hand," he says, "and a budget doesn't work until you get every one of your past transactions in there."
Online banking is a more efficient way to manage all your financial transactions. It gives you both the tools and the free time to analyze your finances and make better decisions. If you turn your PC loose on these tasks, you can enjoy all these savings and banking conveniences today and look forward to being a more savvy money manager in the future.
© 1998 Mike Hogan. All rights reserved.
Mike Hogan writes the Mobile Office column for Computer Currents. He has used online banking and bill paying since their inception and has written dozens of articles on these services, personal financial management, and accounting software.
Getting Started
Banking and paying bills online isn't difficult. But the sign-up process could take longer than a week or more, depending on the procedures of your financial institution and whether you go into the branch or do it through the mail.
In either case, your bank provides you with an application to fill out. After you've returned it, the bank sends you its unique FDIC routing number for electronic transactions and a personal password for accessing its computer via the phone line.
On your end, you will need a PC, a modem, and either a personal finance program like Quicken or Money or an Internet browser such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. Once you are properly outfitted, your bank's tech support staff should be able to step you through the setup process.
If you do your banking on your institution's Web site, you have to launch a dialer and your browser, navigate to the site, type in your password, and conduct your business, which usually requires waiting for various Web pages to download. After that, if you want a record of the session, you can either transcribe the data by hand or capture it off the Web site and import it into another program. America Online (AOL) also offers connections to many different financial institutions; while its procedures differ slightly from Web-based banking, they take about as long.
Using Quicken or Money is much faster. You can upload bills at the same time you download account data. It takes a couple of keystrokes or mouse clicks to create an electronic check, and you can store dozens in your electronic out box until it's time to go online and send them to your bill-paying service of choice (usually your bank). Click a dialog box or two, and either program will dial up your bank's computer through your PC modem. After you enter your password, your program uploads your bill payments, transfers, and other transactions and receives an encrypted download of your checking, savings, credit card, loan, and other statements. The whole exchange usually takes less than a minute.
Your program can upload and download information for multiple accounts at a single institution. If you bank at multiple institutions, as many people do, you have to dial each one separately. This goes for both software- and Web-based banking.
Whichever medium you choose, your data is secure. Major financial institutions use RSA data encryption, a high-level method employed extensively by the United States government for security. Each bank transaction receives its own encryption code, which would require the combined efforts of several supercomputers and many man-years of labor to break. For cyber criminals, it just isn't worth the time.
-M. H.
Consumer Online Banking Fees: The Ifs, Ands, and Buts
Access via
Banking
Bill paying
monthly fee
Number of transactions
Fee per additional transaction
monthly fee/Number of bills
Fee per additional bill
Additional fees, conditions
Freebies
Bank of America
800/792-0808
www.bankamerica.com
Web site
software1
free
free
unlimited
unlimited
free
free
n/a
$5.95/unlimited
n/a
n/a
bill paying free with VERSATEL account
Bank of Stockton
800/941-1494
www.bankstockton.com
software1
$4.95
8
n/a
free/20
n/a
n/a
first year, copy of Money
CheckFree
800/882-5280
www.checkfree.com
software1
n/a
n/a
n/a
$9.95/15
$2.49 for 5
bill pay only
n/a
Citibank
800/446-5331
www.citibank.com
software1
free
unlimited
n/a
unlimited
n/a
n/a
account fee waived with $,2,500 minimum balance
Home Savings
800/310-4932
www.homesavings.com
Web site
software1
$4.95
$6.95
unlimited
unlimited
free
free
free/20
free/20
$.35
$.40
$.30 per session
first two months, copy of Money
Intuit Online Payment
800/224-0991
www.intuit.com
software1
n/a
n/a
n/a
$9.95/20
$2.49 for 5
bill-pay only
first three months half price
Sanwa Bank California
800/237-2692
www.sanwa-bank-ca.com
software1
$4.95-$5.95
8
n/a
free/20
n/a
n/a
first six months, copy of Money
U.S. Bank
800/822-6572
www.usbank.com
software1
$3.95
unlimited
n/a
$2.95/15
$.40
n/a
first month
Union Bank of California
800/796-5656
www.uboc.com
software1
$4.95
unlimited
free
free/25
$.40
$50 signup, $100 minimum balance
free checking account
Wells Fargo Bank N.A.
800/956-4442
wellsfargo.com/home
Web site
software1
free
$3.00
unlimited
unlimited
n/a
n/a
$5/25
$5/25
$.40
$.40
n/a
n/a
first two months
1 All banks listed let you use either Quicken or Money, except Bank of America, which uses Managing Your Money.
Business Online Banking Fees: Ifs, Ands, and Buts
Quickbooks1
Peachtree
Banking
Bill paying
monthly fee/Number of transactions
Additional transaction fees
monthly fee/Number of bills
Additional fee/Number of bills
Additional fees, conditions
Freebies
Bank of America
800/792-0808
www.bankamerica.com
n/a
n/a
free/unlimited
n/a
$5.95/unlimited
n/a
bill paying requires Business Versatel account
fees waived with $3,500 minimum balance
Bank of Stockton
800/941-1494
www.bankstockton.com
yes
n/a
$4.95/8
n/a
free2/20
$.50/1
n/a
first year
CheckFree
800/882-5280
www.checkfree.com
yes
n/a
n/a
n/a
$9.95/20
$5.95/5
bill paying only
n/a
Citibank
800/446-5331
www.citibank.com
n/a
n/a
$15/unlimited
n/a
free2
free/unlimited
$5,000 minimum balance
n/a
Home Savings
800/310-4932
www.homesavings.com
yes
yes
yes
yes
$11.95/8
$14.95/8
n/a
n/a
n/a
free 2/20
n/a
n/a
n/a
$6 additional fee if account balance is less than $3,500
n/a
n/a
Intuit Online Payment
800/224-0991
www.intuit.com
yes
n/a
n/a
n/a
$9.95/20
$2.49/5
bill paying only
n/a
Sanwa Bank California
800/237-2692
www.sanwa-bank-ca.com
yes
n/a
9.95/unlimited
n/a
free2/20
$.45/1
monthly fee covers 8 online sessions, additional sessions cost $.30 each
n/a
U.S. Bank
800/822-6572
www.usbank.com
yes
yes
n/a
n/a
$22.95/unlimited
$12.95/unlimited
n/a
n/a
free 2/20
n/a
$.75/1
n/a
n/a
n/a
n/a
n/a
Union Bank of California
800/796-5656
www.uboc.com
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
$5.95/unlimited
n/a
$14.95/unlimited
n/a
n/a
n/a
n/a
$10.95/20
free2/20
n/a
n/a
$.75/1
monthly fee covers 10 online banking sessions
bill paying only
$9 for first year
n/a
n/a
n/a
Wells Fargo Bank N.A.
800/956-4442
wellsfargo.com/home
n/a
n/a
free /unlimited4, 5
$3/unlimited6
n/a
n/a
$5/25
$5/25
$.40/1
$.40/1
n/a
n/a
first two months
Same as above
1 All banks listed except Bank of America also let you use either Quicken or Money.
2 Included with online banking fee
3 $12.95 for unlimited banking only
4 Free for online banking only
5 Via Web site
6 Via Quicken or Money
