Chicago Weekend Fun!

MidAmerica Bank may not be a financial institution you have heard of, or it could be your personal family bank. Mid America has been a fixture in the suburban working class neighborhoods of Chicago since the 1960′s. My family has banked there since the late 1960′s and I am sad to report that they were recently bought by National City Bank. National City much like Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and ABN AMRO, wants to grow from a smaller banking company into a large nation wide financial company. The way all these banking companies grow is buy buying and gobbling up smaller local bank networks. MidAmerica has their headquarters in Claredon Hills (a western suburb of Chicago) and has grown with branches in Berwyn, Downers Grove, Naperville, Chicago, Lakeview, Burr Ridge, Cicero, Elgin, Glen Ellyn, Niles, Norridge, Shaumburg, Skokie, St Charles, Westchester, Western Springs and Wheaton. (and about 15 more in Wisconsin I didn’t know about until I just looked on their site)

Mid America has been the consistent place to do all your personal banking in the suburbs as the Bank One, Chase, ABN Amro, LaSalle Bank, St Paul Federal and other banks either came and went or came and took over. Mid America was always based locally, you could always talk to someone in person and they were always consistent in their service and security. They may have lacked a lot of money for a fancy online banking interface and you had to know where their ATMs were to avoid the extra cross banking fees, but other than that they have been great. You just grow to trust a company that you have been with your whole life. Now I am not sure to expect.

When large banking conglomerates come in and gobble up smaller local banks a few things tend to happen, and these are the fears that I have that this will be bad for the customers of MidAmerica Bank.

1. The fees go up. For no reason really. It’s more to get a registered check, more for a transfer between accounts, more for ATM withdrawals and more if a check bounces and you don’t have the automatic transfer set up. It’s just because they are huge and figure they can get away with it. Trust me the higher fees are NOT because you are getting more or they are better somehow. It’s just a big greedy profitability decision.

2. The service level goes down. People don’t know what is going on in branches because headquarters is so far away. Bank service people aren’t trained well or informed of policies and product information. You get the wrong information a lot, and they are under more high pressure to sell products to keep their job so they just make it up and who knows what you will get charged for. They know once you’ve signed up the chances are small that you will come back and complain or request a change of any kind. So, they just pressure you into whatever they have on promotion to meet a quota goal and make up whatever to get it closed. This is crap service and it’s really common with large national or international companies that have aggressive growth goals.

3. They don’t know the community and they don’t care. This makes a difference when you know that the needs of one area of the country aren’t anything like the needs of another. Mid America knew what the Chicago suburbs were about. Originally in the 60′s and 70′s they were about savings. Local Polish immigrant populations and their kids were big time savers. They remember what it was like in the Great Depression or back in Poland and always saved for retirement and just as a financially responsible lifestyle. They all did well with it too when interest rates were high in the 70′s. In the 80′s banking in the suburbs was about Money Markets and Checking Accounts. People were changing over from all cash or savings to checks to pay for things. Money markets allowed check writing flexibility with good interest if you had a lot of savings and met the minimum. Mid America also had a check card before anyone else did in the area in the 90′s. They were on top of what people wanted in Chicago and especially the suburbs. Mid America Bank never had issues with identity theft that I heard about and my family has never had an issue in dealing with them. They hold the retirement IRAs and Mortgages of a lot of suburbanites and we don’t know what will happen with those accounts and policies. will the terms all change? Will National City be there to support us when we need it? Will we just be able to walk in and make changes anytime we want like we are now? I highly doubt that any national company is going to understand the banking needs of the local community because they only care about growth and profit. 

4. The motivation for growth and profit is immense. Like I mentioned above all the bank fees go up, new bank fees get invented and new banking products with fees get created and forcibly bundled and sold. They do all this because of the margin on a product or the profitability and revenue it brings in, not because the customers need or want it. It also goes to pay for their huge advertising budgets because no one would ever refer them to a friend by word of mouth. No one ever has a good experience. Advertising to death and creating wacky promotions is the only way to wear down customers and get them to finally get their banking done there.

5. Security is Bad. No national company has not been in the news for millions of it’s customer’s personal information and data being stolen. It’s just too easy, all these records are in the same place, and spammers and intelligence dealers love that they can get so much data in one hit. And these big national banks are usually so disconnected and unconcerned with security (because all they think about is sales) they don’t even know it.

6.  NBC (channel 5 in Chicago) is also reporting that Mid America will be laying off 400 people in Downers Grove and the Chicago area. Probably most of their operations at the headquarters in Claredon Hills, IL. This sucks even more that they are firing people locally because their size means they can engulf all the management over the branches from their central location. Now there are 400 more people in Chicago without jobs in a bad economy! Like we don’t already have too many qualified people looking for work because they got let go because some fat cat got a good bonus to take over the company they worked for. Ugh, this is disgusting, we should all boycott National City Bank.

So, with all these reasons to build a case about National City turning will I change my bank? Initially no. I can’t find another local bank that would be better at keeping the needs of the local suburban community in mind right now. If I do find one, I would like to switch, and if you know of a small local banking chain in your area of the suburbs, let us know and post a comment about it below.  I have to say that many people will be watching National City and if anything happens so that we get a bad experience and problems happen with our accounts or money we will leave in droves. I am not sure there will be a better place to go to, but bad behavior shouldn’t be reinforced by putting up with it. Companies don’t listen unless they loose money. So, if you bank at Mid America and have a good or bad experience with the new National City People (and their wacky points thing that won’t accumulate to be worth anything) let us know by posting below.

Update 11/9/07: Evidence of National City being a crap bank. They held and then bounced a check being deposited by a customer that gets paid by Google monthly because National City had a fradulent Google check cashed by a scammer in the past. Blocking all checks from Google because one was fraudulent in the past is not a good policy, and is bad for customers who are just trying to deposit their earnings. National City is just interested in protecting it’s own interests and not those of it’s customers.