For Wells Fargo customers, using other banks’ ATMs just got a bit more expensive.
Effective on Tuesday, the company raised its fee to $2.50 from $2 for using non-Wells Fargo ATMs. That’s twice the national average of $1.25, according to Bankrate.com.
Also, customers checking their account balances – though not withdrawing any money – on a non-Wells Fargo ATM must pay $1.50 in fees.
Though all ATMs on campus are Wells Fargo, when off campus UNL students who are Wells Fargo customers may run into these fees.
Wells Fargo customer and UNL student Abby Fitzgerald isn’t happy with all these fees. “All students are to Wells Fargo are piggy banks,” she said.
Charged twice
In addition to the Wells Fargo fees, students more than likely will also be hit with the fee from the bank that owns the ATM. According to Bankrate.com, 99 percent of banks charge fees for non-customers using their ATMs.
Bankrate estimated that in 2007 all these fees will add up to roughly $4.4 billion.
Fitzgerald said that’s absurd.
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“I don’t think it’s right to be charged twice for the same thing,” Fitzgerald said, noting her former hometown bank she didn’t charge such fees.
“So it’s definitely possible to not charge these fees, but they do it just to make a pretty penny,” she said.
Bank’s perspective
Angie Kaipust, assistant vice-president for Wells Fargo Communications in Nebraska, sees things another way.
She said such fees are the tradeoff customers choose when using a non-Wells Fargo ATM because it’s closer.
“It’s about convenience,” she said, adding that Wells Fargo has nearly 70,00 ATMs nationwide, with 30 in Lincoln and several of them on UNL’s campus.
She said charges change periodically when Wells Fargo assesses fees and their cost of doing business.
Customers were notified about the change with a message or an insert in their statements, Kaipust said.
Disclosure
Overall, banks are failing to give customers information about fees on savings and checking accounts, despite federal rules requiring it, reported a Government Accountability Office report being released Thursday.
The American Bankers Association, an industry group, declined to comment on the report because it hadn’t seen it.
Undercover Government Accountable Office staffers visited 185 branches of 154 financial institutions across the U.S. and couldn’t get comprehensive lists of account fees at more than 20 percent of them. The information was missing from the majority of the banks’ and credit unions’ Web sites.
A notice of the Wells Fargo fee increase appeared under the link “Consumer Price Changes” on the company’s Web site.
-The Washington Post contributed to this report.
