Consumer complaint received 2016-03-17
Company: BANK OF AMERICA, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION
State: CA
Product: Bank account or service
Sub-product: Checking account
Issue: Deposits and withdrawals

Complaint:
I wanted to bring to the CFPB the following instance where I think consumer protection needs to be applied. I bank with Bank of America. I utilize on-line banking for Bill Pay and for managing my finances. I have direct deposit and other features which I use on a regular basis. On the interface user platform website that consumers see when they log in to On-Line Bank is the listing of accounts. When you go into each account, you see a snapshot of your account, with summary, account balance, available history and then below that what is processing for that day and what has cleared. When you go to Bill-Pay Screen where customers can make automatic payments, there is outgoing payments box. 

About two weeks ago, I instructed Bank of America to make payments to my children school, each totaling {$3100.00}. I, technically speaking, asked the bank to process and issue a check for me to be paid on XX/XX/XXXX. I also a few weeks ago also asked the bank to process a payment for XXXX XXXX for {$100.00}. Today, I checked my on-line banking account page and saw that my XXXX XXXX payment was " processing '' and my account was deducted by the {$100.00}. But the payments made by Bank of America to my children 's school for {$3100.00} each were not showing up as " processing. '' This is a considerable amount of funds that were essentially processed by the bank with a confirmation assigned by the bank for the transition. Yet, my on-line banking balance did not reflect anywhere this deducted amount as of XX/XX/XXXX. 

When I inquired, the Bank of America customer service said that that they do n't on the bill pay side show on the summary account side processed checks that they were instructed to send as " processing '' nor to they show this deduction anywhere in the on-line bank balance account summary or processing transactions. The only way you would know that these pending transactions were to be posted on XX/XX/XXXX were to go into Bill Pay. Then manually figure out your balance to know that you were not going to overdrawn when ACH clears at XXXX. 

I bring this to your attention because I believe that any bank online user interface should be consumer friendly. No where would I know on my account summary that XXXX checks each for {$3100.00} were going to be debited from my account on XX/XX/XXXX unless I remembered to check my bill pay page. The summary of my account page does not reflect these as " processing '' payment even though I instructed the bank to send out or process these payments. If I did not have adequate funds or overdraft protection, I might run the risk of over drawing my account without realizing it because my account summary as of XX/XX/XXXX did not show these XXXX pending debits. The bank would then be able to charge me {$35.00} overdrafts and return checks. A consumer would have no way of knowing accurately what there bank account balance is as of the date payments are being sent and processed by the Bnak Please advise and to who I might talk to about this very frustrating and worrisome feature. Bank 's make most of their money off these types of consumer fees but, in fact, so consumers are accurately informed any consumer interface should be clear, accurate and reflect any and all transactions that the bank has been asked to process on behalf of the consumer / customer. I have screen shots I have shared with CFPB about what happened today on XX/XX/XXXX regarding account summary, processing transactions and bill pay.

Company public response: Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response
Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation