Comments on: Perkstreet Financial Checking Account Review

By: Tara

Tara — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 04:19:22 +0000

Overall I’m happy with Perkstreet, and I’ve received almost $200 cash back in the year and a half I’ve had the account. However, due to the inability to have same-day deposits, extreme slowness of deposits, and the number of days it takes to transfer money, I have paid way more than that in fees. I work sporadically and payment sometimes comes in the form of cash and personal check. There simply is no way to deposit cash, and the check deposits take more than a week. So I end up spending the cash (no perks there- and no purchase protection), cashing the checks (having to drive to my client’s bank, which alot of times charges me a fee), and buying money orders (another fee).

By: Carl

Carl — Wed, 04 May 2011 15:57:06 +0000

WARNING ON PERKSTREET: If you take the “cash” rewards option they send you a visa check card. If you never receive or lose your check card YOUR MONEY IS GONE AND THEY CANNOT REPLACE IT. I just got off the phone with a PerkStreet customer service rep because this happened to me. A $50 card never arrived (although I did receive two $100 cards prior to this). I was apologetically told there was nothing they could do. Essentially, someone in their shipping department can take the cards, list them as shipped and you are S.O.L.

I’m quite pissed.

For those who do keep your account (I’m going to kill mine), you should take the amazon.com gift cards. The codes are supposedly emailed.

By: Jason Henrichs

Jason Henrichs — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 23:51:33 +0000

My name is Jason Henrichs and I work for PerkStreet. I’ve corresponded with AV since his experience and also worked with our customer service team to improve the information he was delivered. We are always working to improve the experience and any customer’s feedback is appreciated. We are taking action on the areas of AV’s experience that can be corrected, but there are several parts of his claim that I’d like to better explain.
Unfortunately fighting fraud is a tremendous burden that has several impacts not just for the bank but for the customers as we establish a relationship. For AV’s first point, the limit does go up over time and with the deeper relationship. There are several ways you can get money in the account besides our free online transfer- by pushing the money from the other account, setting up direct deposit or sending a check. We recognized that this would limit a new customer’s ability to meet the $5,000 threshold which is why we put in a 90 day grace period where you earn 2% no matter what. If we were looking to bait and switch to keep your balance captive we certainly wouldn’t have done that. We keep a small share of the interchange earned when a customer uses the card and give most of it back to the customer. It is in our best interest to make sure customers can spend as much as they want while balancing the fraud exposure to us and to the customer.
On the daily limit, I’ve worked with the customer service agent on how to better handle the situation and apologize that it was not a stellar experience.
For your last point on the check, it is clearly stated in FAQs what the hold times are but let’s face it, wading through FAQs is a pain so you naturally picked up the phone where the representative was not clear in her explanation. Again, I’ve worked on the education that she should have inquired whether you were a new customer because their is an extra hold time for the first 30 days.
Unfortunately banks have done little to engender trust so we’re fighting little by little to do better and earn that back. IM- I hope you’ll give us a shot. We aren’t perfect but I can assure we have many customers who love us. And I don’t know many other banks that have their COO writing a lengthy reply to an irate customer on a Saturday because he genuinely cares about making banking better.
Any customer or potential customer can contact me directly if they have questions or suggestions: jhenrichs -at- perkstreet.com

By: AV

AV — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 21:35:02 +0000

There are several problems with this bank, so I would warn potential customers to be aware of the fine print. Although PerkStreet’s website has the appearance of being clear about their policies, I found that not to be the case. These “fine print” policies seem designed to (1) make it difficult to move money out of the account, and (2) to limit the cashback that you can earn. Below are examples.

(1) They have a limit of $1500 on incoming online transfers in an entire *month*! They don’t tell you about this anywhere except when you actually try to move money into your account. When I called them about it, they said that they have this restriction for new customers and I was still in my first month. After a couple more calls, I realized that they will increase this limit to $2500 after six months.

Stated reason: Security.
Suspected motive: To limit the amount of money you can spend to get cashback.

(2) They have a limit of $500 on outgoing online transfers. So, say you move $5000 into your account to get 2% cashback. You are stuck with that money with them for the rest of the month (unless you adopt a slower paper check route).

(3) They have a limit of $1500 on daily expenses and explicitly say on their website that it can be waived simply by making a phone call. I had to book two one-way international flight tickets that cost a total of over $1500. I booked these and called them to waive the limit. They refused to do so because I was still in my first month. There is no notice about waivers not being allowed in the first month anywhere. As a result, I have to now spend much more money re-booking that ticket just because PerkStreet does not allow me to spend my own money.

Stated reason: Security for new customers. They claim that all banks have spending limits on debit cards. Really? Bank of America did not.

Suspected motive: Limiting spending => limiting cashback.

(4) When I tried to circumvent the limitation in (1) above to move more money into my account using FedEx, there was another surprise! The first FedEx check takes not 1 day as stated, but about 9 days for some reason. Again, some vague security reason that is incomprehensible to rational beings is given as an explanation.

Bottomline: It is not easy to get much cashback because of their restrictive policies on what you can do with your money. And they make it harder to move money out of the account while not giving any interest on it. As for the 5% cashback, they are on such specific and tiny items that I have never been able to get 5% cashback so far.