Bank Of America Plans SMS-based Overdraft Service
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Tired of getting nailed with a $35 fee every time you go 10 cents over your balance, but don’t want to outright block overdrafts on your account? Check this out: Bank of America is planning to roll out a new service that’ll send a notification to customers through a text message, prompting them for permission to allow the purchase.
Here’s how it works: Let’s say you can’t cough up the cash for the Samsung Galaxy S II that you’ve been desperately waiting for, and it just so happens that you’re debit card is maxed out, too. In that case, Bank of America will send you a text message once you’re debit card is rejected, asking whether or not you’d like to permit an overdraft to occur. If you reply in the affirmative, Bank of America will temporarily cover the purchase, and give you the until the end of the banking day to refill your account. If you can’t refill your account by the end of the day, they’ll nail you with that $35 fee.
The service isn’t set to launch until 2012, but that should be just in time for Bank of America’s cutback of 10 percent of its brick-and-mortar branches as the company tries to shift its customers over to mobile banking.
[via Mobiledia]
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