The transaction re-ordering to maximize the amount of overdraft events should have put execs in prison. Out of all the obviously corrupt, mal-intent, direct consumer harming practices this was quite near the top.
In a French bank, I have credit transactions first then debit ones, in a Swiss bank, the contrary, I was shocked, especially that day, I did check my bank account to verify if I could proceed with a wire transfer, the following day, it shown a temporary minus amount but I didn't get an overdraft. So yes, fuck banks.
In Australia in 2010 I got a debit card for the first time in my life. The card would simply reject transactions. “As should be”, I thought. It was a revolution for me.
Revolut, Simple, and Chime, the three online only banks I have tried, all do (or did) this. It really helped back when I was living paycheck to paycheck.
For what it's worth; I banked with Simple for the better part of 10 years, but then they acquired by BBVA who was then acquired by PNC. That meant that all Simple customers had to go through account migration twice this year, and in the end now have all the typical fees associated with traditional accounts. Ultimately I decided to move to a local credit union.
I moved to One Financial, but I've kept a local credit union account as well. This probably makes no sense, but then again it's ok to feel conservative about banking.
It's worked out for me so far. The local credit union is one block away. I have not used it but there are no fees to just park money in a checking account.
I still don't know what happpens to such retail banking as interest rates go negative.
It wasn’t illegal, and maybe isn’t (although I thought it was). I know that I was impacted by this as a college student, and ended up paying hundreds of dollars in fees for a single weekend. I had OD protection fees and “bounce fees” for the “protection fees”. It was insane. However I thought this was at least made unprofitable by capping fees and limiting when they could be applied.
All of this insane behavior is a big reason why the CFPB was created, and legislation was passed to limit “overdraft protection” auto-opt-in.
