Why I Still Dislike Bank of America

I was loyal to BofA for many, many years. I opened my first high school bank account with them, and back in the days of punch cards, my first ever credit card was a BankAmericard – which eventually became VISA. But when BofA started nickel and diming (and ten-dollaring) me to death in the 1980’s, I moved my money to a credit union and never looked back.

I have not dealt with them from that day until about a month ago when I was issued a Bank of America prepaid card by a branch of our government. Payments go onto this card biweekly and the card itself can be used like any debit card, or the payments can be manually or automatically transferred into an account at any financial institution.

On August 13, I set up recurring transfers to my credit union’s checking account and waited for my August 16 payment to be transferred. The transfer didn’t happen, so I did it manually a couple of weeks later then called Bank of America to find out what went wrong. The call center agent told me that the recurring transfer wasn’t set up until after the August 16 payment, but assured me that the automated transfer would take place for the next one.

I let the agent know that I had an email and a screenshot which both confirmed that the recurring transfer definitely was set up on the 13th, and she told me that their systems showed that it definitely was set up after the 16th.

As a cybersecurity and IT professional, her response told me that their front-end and back-end systems somehow were out of sync and I asked the agent to escalate this to their web support team, which she did. The web support agent also told me that my recurring transfer showed as being set up after the 16th and she had no interest in pursuing the issue any further.

My next step was to reach out to the Bank of America social media (SoMe) team, so I tweeted the issue and after a few back and forth direct messages, the SoMe agent called to tell me that it was the government agency and not Bank of America who controls the recurring transfers - and to contact them.

I asked her to confirm that even though I configured the recurring transfer on a bankofamerica.com website, Bank of America was not responsible for the transfers – and she said yes.

So I believe that we have a few problems here:

• There seems to be a disconnect between Bank of America's front-end and back-end systems. The front-end shows that I created the recurring funds transfer on August 13, while the back-end systems show that I didn't create it until after August 16.
• The call center does not or can not take ownership of what I believe to be a problem.
• The social media team doesn't seem to know who is responsible for funds transfers. Is it really the government, or is it Bank of America?

Admittedly this is a small first-word problem, and I assume that my recurring transfer actually will happen with the next deposit. But it does show me that there are problems which no one seems to want to accept nor address.