The hits just keep coming.
First, we have the 6-year-old Illinois kid who was issued a credit card by Bank of America. His mom had him fill it out on a lark, correctly listing his date-of-birth and an income of zero. In return the kid got a card with a $600 credit limit.
Next, a couple in Nashville find that “free” checking with BofA means a $20 monthly fee unless you call customer support each and every month to remind them that your home equity line of credit is supposed to exempt you from the fee.
What is interesting about these incidents is that many folks automatically take them as evidence of BofA’s predatory and consumer-munching nature. There is some indifference to consumer-relations here, no doubt. But the bigger issue that connects these type of misfires of common sense is BofA’s crazy-quilt IT structure. Expansions and mergers over the years have still not been fully digested on the back-end, the result being a lack information about accounts flowing to employees in a position to do something with that info.
Plainly there is no DOB screen on the processing center that handles credit applications from the Midwest. In fact, DOB probably only exists a secondary customer ID element — the actual age of applicant is probably never computed or seen by anyone associated with the bank.
In the case of the free-not-free accounts, I’d wager that not all of the Nashville accounts were opened at the same time, at the same branch, in the same state. This is a more serious error by BofA, which tries to market itself as a fully-integrated national bank when in reality it is in many ways a brand name of unrelated parts. Consumers contribute to this misperception by thinking an ATM equals a bank.
The upshot? Ken Lewis needs to redouble efforts to turn inward and fix these issues before dreaming of digesting a shambling horror like Countrywide.
