Who thought up this bank promotion?

[drcollie]

This appeared in my email inbox from my bank where I have most my personal accounts. Read the offer.



I have a decent sized Money Market account at this bank and saw this and said to myself "I need to move some out of that account and into a CD with them". Then I read the fine print where it has to be NEW money to get this rate. Odd. So today I went into my Branch and inquired, and the Manager there said "Yes, this is correct, we cannot offer that to you unless you bring us new money that is not already on deposit here in our bank". He added that he did not agree with this and voiced a strong opinion against this promotion.

So I said to him, "I am getting .05% on my Money Market Account and you have nothing to offer me on a 12 month CD?" And he said that was correct if using funds I already have in the bank. The message here to their customer is "You don't matter, we value new customers and new money. but not you".

OK, got it. So what did I do? Easy, went over to Pen Fed where they are offering 3.5% on a 12 month CD and pulled my money of my Money Market Account from my bank and put it in that Pen Fed CD. So not only did that bank lose my money, they lost my trust. I have to wonder who does their Marketing? Are they that clueless? I wonder how many customers they will lose before they figure out their promotion has backfired on them. One thing we always try to do at The Keeping Room is put ourselves in our customers shoes and always realize that our most valuable customers are our existing ones.

P.S. I was going to buy I-Series Treasuries but the US Treasury Direct website but it has crashed due to volume and I gave up after a couple of hours - how does a Government website go down? Crazy Times.