Caught in a bad romance

My love affair with my new ING chequing account has hit it's first rocky period. You'll remember that I first swooned over ING chequing when they offered me $100 to switch my payroll deposits to their account, guaranteed $0 of monthly banking fees, and had several ATMs within walking distance to my house and office. Compared to the price I was paying to be CIBC's customer, switching seemed like an easy thing to do. After all, it was love at first sight.

Now that I've been an ING chequing customer for 8 weeks, the honeymoon period is over and I'm starting to notice the account's quirks. The greatest nuisance at the moment is the lack of access to e-mail money transfers. As described below ING offers free e-mail money transfers for account holders to send money to clients and non-clients of ING.



What is missing from the "fine print" is the ability to be
paid back by a friend quickly and easily.



But what if the account holder is owed money by a friend who is not banking with ING? I did stumble upon this glitch last month when I received my first automatic e-mail money transfer from a friend who banks with BMO and discovered that I couldn't deposit the money into my ING account. At the time, an ING rep explained to me that they are being purposely excluded from the money transfer network that currently includes RBC, CIBC, TD, BMO, and PC Financial. Apparently, these banks are trying to make it inconvenient for ING account holders to do business outside their network.

What's a financially fabulous ING chequing account user to do?

The big banks are definitely succeeding as I've received yet another e-mail money transfer this month and once again, relied on my Eye Candy to deposit it into his CIBC chequing account and then write me a cheque. Fortunately, I can trust him and he knew correctly the name of my sister's first hamster so the transfer was quite simple. But if I didn't have my Eye Candy around to shuffle funds for me, I'd be going back and forth with friends requesting cheques and waiting on snail mail. This seems like a step backwards in the era of mobile banking.

I've called in again to ING to express my frustration and I have their assurances that they are continuing to negotiate to be part of the interac e-transfer system. Until then, I will have to rely upon my Eye Candy's loyalty to his CIBC chequing account and hope he doesn't start to charge me transaction fees.

Has anyone else made the switch to ING? How are you liking it?

*Rosie*