Disadvantages of PC Financial Banking

I'm a huge advocate of President's Choice Financial Banking. It boggles my mind that anyone out there is still paying fees for daily banking, at least in Canada.

PC Financial checking and savings accounts are free. There are NO service charges. Checks are unlimited and free. Bank machine transactions are unlimited and free. The interest is always amoung the highest offered for savings accounts. All CIBC bank machines can be used with no service charges. Bill payments are free. There are no minimums to keep in the account in order that the service charges be waived. PC reps are available in select stores for in-person assistance. Internet, phone and bank machine banking are all free.

With all these advantages, why would anyone still be paying $12 a month for banking, and be limited to 10 transactions to boot?

Well, I've gathered a list of all the disadvantages of PC Financial I could think of or find. If these don't seem like a big deal to you and you're still using RBC/TD/BNS/BMO/CIBC, maybe it's time to switch.

• no ability to send email money transfers (but can receive them)
• no brokerage services (but numerous independent services are available)
  
• lack of readily-available human tellers (who needs 'em?)
  
• no foreign currency accounts (this could be an issue if you handle a lot of foreign cash)
  
• 24 hour delay to transfer from savings to checking accounts (this is pretty standard for high-interest accounts)
  
• cannot get rolls of change (doesn't bother me)
  
• delay of 1-5 days to get money into and out of other banks via bank-to-bank transfer (standard for bank-to-bank transfers)
  
• have to conduct advanced banking functions by mail (heard of this, still have not seen an example)
  
• need to send a check and wait a week to initially link to external bank accounts (only do this once, no big deal)
  

Personally, the only time I still visit another bank is to buy foreign currency. I suppose this involves bullets 3 and 4. Other than that, in 4 years of banking exclusively with PC Financial, I've never had any issues.

Please note that bank tellers at your traditional bank are generally not very knowledgeable about how Internet banking works. I have been able to do numerous functions that they insisted were not possible. These include:

• Transferring money into my CIBC Investor's Edge brokerage account (use PC Financial bill payments)
• Transferring money out of my CIBC Investor's Edge brokerage account (CIBC branches can cut you a check which you then deposit)
• Transferring money from an external account without physically carrying cash from one bank machine to another (bank-to-bank transfer using linked accounts)
• Receiving only credit card e-statements (I hate paper statements and CIBC insists they have to send them)