I love online banking – especially because my bank doesn’t charge any fees, has good interest rates and gets me free groceries (www.preschoicefinancial). It’s a so-called “virtual” bank, and I’ve had very few problems. Only issues – sometimes the posting dates occur a couple of days in advance. For instance, the first of the month coming is a Saturday. Any transactions due to go through on the first have already happened and are posted to the account, even though it is only Thursday today. The money has left the account, BUT the posting date is listed as the 31st. It’s very confusing, mildly annoying (and I worry that I’m getting gyped a few cents in interest). The weirdness to do with posting dates happens routinely.
Other than that, when cashing US cheques (or savings bonds), you don’t get access to all the money until they have cleared. If you go into a real bank, you can get the interest and exchange bonuses right away, but the machine has no way of telling what kind of material (ie cheque, US cheque, savings bond, cash etc) it’s “eating”
However, the real reason I started writing this was in response to the “downloads directly to quicken” comment. I think this is a bad, bad idea, and encourages people to be lazy. On the other hand, I guess it’s better than not looking at your bank statements at all (which apparently happens…). The problem with direct downloads is that most people just download their statements. They should be entering the information into Quicken first and then doing a cross-check against the bank records. Just downloading means that if the bank screws up (which happens!), and you are using the bank’s records as your primary source of accounting info, you are never going to notice!