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Monday, December 04, 2017

Is It Tuesday? Time For Another Banking Scandal...

Another day, another major banking scandal.

It’s getting to the point where you can practically set your watch to these things.

The latest involves our old friend Wells Fargo.

The Wall Street Journal reported last night that Wells has been screwing its customers on foreign currency exchange rates.

According to the Journal, Wells Fargo conducted an internal review of its fee arrangements and found that they had massively overcharged 88% of the sampled customers.

For example, the bank might have signed a contract with a customer to charge 0.15% on foreign currency transactions, but instead charged as much as 4%… about 26x higher than agreed.

It’s absurd to begin with that a bank would charge even a small percentage-based commission on foreign currency transactions (much less 4%), especially given that most of the transactions were to exchange euros and US dollars.

Sure, commissions are common in many industries.

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