BOA customers beware: More nickel-and-diming ahead!

Bruce Mohl of the Boston Globe breaks a story this morning about Bank Of America raising fees yet again:

An internal Bank of America memo obtained by The Boston Globe said the tiered fee structure for overdrafts and bounced checks will change June 9, with the fee for two to four occurrences over a 12-month period rising from $31 to $33 and the fee for occurrences beyond four rising from $34 to $35. The fee for the first day's occurrence is remaining at $19. An occurrence is defined as a day with at least one overdraft or returned item.

Mohl talked to one of BOA's PR flacks, who said the vast majority of customers never overdraw their accounts. That leads me to ask, if so few people do it, then why bother raising fees? It will piss off a lot of people, and with few offendeers, there can't be much in the way of profit for BOA.

Well, the reason why BOA is doing it is because there is a lot of money in it for them, and BOA's PR person was downplaying or lying about the frequency of people who overdraw their accounts. From the article:

Greg McBride, a senior analyst with Bankrate.com, said he suspects that overdraft fees are big revenue generators for most banks, although he said banks don't break out specific fee income. He said overdraft and bounced check fees have been rising quickly in recent years. McBride said the average bounced check fee was $26.90 last fall.

BOA's customer service reps are already preparing for the fallout. They've been issued scripts telling them how to deal with angry customers.

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