Think it sucks to be a TD Bank customer this week, especially if you were formerly a Commerce Bank customer? Try being a TD Bank employee. One insider tells what it what was like yesterday on the other side of all those (still) unprocessed transactions and new fees.

Our tipster writes:

For as long as I have worked at TD Bank, I have never seen it even a fraction of how busy it was today. Our external phone lines were busy for most of the day with customers calling us to figure out what was going on. Until about 1:00 or 1:30 we couldn’t get balances for customers because the overnight processing wasn’t completed yet. When we were back on-line, nothing for the current day was reflecting on our customer’s accounts. There was an internal extension to call to get direct deposit amounts and have them made available but we had to keep calling to get through.

On top of that, our new fees went into effect. Despite the news last week that our largest competitors were switching to am overdraft policy that is more customer friendly than commerce’s, td bank still went through with a policy that lets debit card transactions overdraw their account (with a $35 fee), puts customers in an overdraft protection plan without their consent ( without telling them how much their overdraft protection will cover), and charges customers a fee even if the account is overdrawn $0.01 and a sustained overdraft balance fee. In addition to that, our cash reserves charge a $5 for every overdraft transfer and will only transfer the amount of the overdraft plus the $5 fee. The statements that our customers now will receive do not give a time or date for checkcard transactions, so we can not convincingly show our customers what transactions overdrafted their accounts. The posting order has changed that the largest check is posted first, which your website and almost every consumer advocate organization has rallied against.

Because we were offline today, our main customer service program would not bring up an itemized list of pending transactions, even though the customers could see it on their on-line banking. The program that our back office uses does not have a function that breaks down the credits and debit totals, or have a list of pending checkcard transactions like the one commerce used.

This was how our day was at td bank today.

(Photo: Umeboshi Panda)

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