By Robin Sidel
The Wall Street Journal
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Bank on it: Higher fees, and more of them, are coming soon to a financial institution near you.
Regulators in the past year have pushed through a raft of changes designed to rein in banks’ most abusive practices, from excessive overdraft fees to the way lenders raise interest rates when a credit-card payment is late. The new rules are expected to slice billions from firms’ profits—and more if lawmakers move forward with a bill to limit how much financial institutions can charge merchants for debit-card transactions.
Banks, of course, aren’t giving up those revenues without a fight. Instead, industry leaders like Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co., HSBC Holdings PLC’s HSBC North America, Fifth Third Bancorp and others are experimenting with new ways to nick their customers, from imposing maintenance fees on checking accounts to rolling out new charges for services like fraud alerts, debit cards and credit reports.
Making matters trickier, while the banks must disclose the new fees fully, they likely will do so only in the ordinary-looking correspondence that most consumers toss in the trash without reading. The result: Many people will learn of the new charges only after opening their monthly statements.
