I find this disturbing on a couple levels | Coast Capital Savings | Discussion forum

No experience, but I share your concern.

I have noticed that it's now typical for FIs to say, somewhere deep in the fine print that transactions may be or will be pushed through the US. I just can't remember if that applies more to credit cards. I think it does, but not sure. For a while, it was possible to avoid this by boycotting one or the other FI, but it seems this is now just about impossible if not in fact impossible.

Welcome to global capitalism.

Rick said
I decided to throw some of my emergency fund into the 4% GIC @ CC. So I;m poking around the web site and see "Add an External Account". "Great" I think. "CC has finally joined the 21st century and I can link external accounts, so I click the button and get taken here:
https://www.coastcapitalsavings.com/TakeChargeMoneyManager/
Looks weird so I check the video, FAQ's and instruction pdf. To my surprise, it's appears to be just an on line, glorified Quicken/Money type program that keeps track of all transactions in all linked external accounts. To do that, you have to allow a 3rd party, located in the US, into all your accounts by providing institutions, passwords, account numbers, names and anything else needed to access your external accounts. Yeah right.... I can only imagine the implications of giving a US company all my financial information should there be legal action, either personal, corporate or government, US or Canadian.
The stupid thing is that it looks like once they get all that information, you still can't implement transfers from CC.
Maybe I'm being overly paranoid, but just doesn't seem like a wise idea to have ALL financial information collected by a 3rd party stored in one place on line in another country. Might even be a violation of the other FI's T&C. If they found out you gave away all your info and then your account was compromised. I could see you being SOL.
Does anyone have any experience with this service?  

Hi Rick:

That's a personal "beef" I have. When I politely challenged their social media team on Facebook now that they've partnered with a third-party personal finance tracking software provider, surely using a service such as Mint.com should not invalidate one's online banking security guarantee any longer. I had hoped for a reply that said, "great point, we've just completely invalidated our argument." Instead, she cited a legally-binding agreement between Coast and the provider as being somehow "better," even though the company they're using is smaller than Mint.com, which I think Intuit now owns. 🙁

To be fair, though, RBC, BMO, Scotiabank, Tangerine, Vancity, First West Credit Union and others all use such internally-developed or externally-provided personal finance software tools that allow tracking of bank accounts in one place. I'm not opposed to them, in principle. What I am opposed to is the apparent "double standard" with respect to what violates, and what doesn't, the bank's online banking security guarantee. It should be modified by all to such that certain datasets (financials, sensitive ID numbers and names, birth dates, etc.) be encrypted with a standard 256 bit encryption algorithm, something like that.

Also confusing is that despite being able to link an external bank account to their Take Charge Money Manager, that doesn't link it for the purposes of Me-to-Me Transfers, which they don't offer yet and is currently my other "bone of contention."

Such matters are not material to me not further consolidating my business with Coast, though.

For what it's worth, you can opt out of the Take Charge Money Manager but it requires a branch visit or a phone call to the Contact Centre. I suggested making the request available online, self-serve, and/or also making it purely opt-in instead of opt-out and they said they'd, of course, "consider my feedback by passing it on to the appropriate team(s)." Still, at least with Coast, you can fully opt-out (and/or back in again), if you wished. With Tangerine, I'm stuck with their seemingly "helpful" automatic categorization of my transactions that are, about 50% of the time, incorrect. 🙁

Cheers,
Doug

When I bought my 33 month gic and realized they couldn't link an external account, I was wondering how I was going to get my principle once it matured because i live in a rural area no where close to a coast capital.
Tangerine dropped a few cents into my coast account and I confirmed and they linked at their end. Now I just have to pull from tangerine at maturity.
Wish all FI's could link they way tangerine does.

toto said
When I bought my 33 month gic and realized they couldn't link an external account, I was wondering how I was going to get my principle once it matured because i live in a rural area no where close to a coast capital.
Tangerine dropped a few cents into my coast account and I confirmed and they linked at their end. Now I just have to pull from tangerine at maturity.
Wish all FI's could link they way tangerine does.  

Do you have access to an Exchange or Acculink network ATM? Write a cheque and deposit it that way or use the Coast Mobile Banking app and their Deposit-on-the-go feature. That's what I do, until bank-to-bank transfers come. 😉

Very few FIs truly support fully electronic linking of external bank accounts, with Hubert Financial and Sunova Credit Union being the first in Canada (well other than maybe Ally Canada, I didn't have an account with Sunova before Ally Canada!) followed by Tangerine. I'm not aware of any others, perhaps DUCA? It's coming...the key is waiting on Central 1 Credit Union and then the banking platform providers to upgrade their systems to support whatever method Central 1 implements. Then, it has to roll out to the FIs.

Cheers,
Doug

toto said
Yes we have the exchange. Thanks, another good way to access coast capital, closest branch to me is kelowna, 5 hours away.  

No problem, which city/town are you in, by the way, toto? 🙂

If it's a B.C. credit union in your town/city, then they're also part of Acculink. All Canadian credit unions are part of Acculink (ding-free.ca), with a few exceptions in Ontario and elsewhere. Most Canadian credit unions are on Exchange and many Canadian banks as well.

Cheers,
Doug

I'm in Nelson, and we have a local credit union. I will use the exchange as another option to access coast.
Happy that I could link at tangerine end though, much easier to eft.
Thanks for the help .

Marnie said
Re: Posts 8 & 9. Thanks Rick and Doug for your detailed explanation of Me-to-Me Transfers. I didn't realise that my Tangerine links to my external FIs are Me-to-Me Transfers and that I'm already using it. On the surface it's really not much different from the links I set up at Hubert except Hubert uses micro-deposits to authenticate the account at the external FIs whereas you say Me-to-Me Transfers are not paperless electronic linking so I must have signed some papers at Tangerine to set it up initially. The FIs complicate and confuse by using different terminology like Me-to-Me Transfers, links, electronic funds transfer, pre-authorized payment/debit, pre-authorized credit, direct deposit, etc. to do the same thing. Ofcourse they want to make it confusing so that customers don't know how to transfer out their money easily.  

No problem. And yes, Tangerine used to require a VOID cheque or bank statement to link accounts (that's how my first external account was linked). However, since then, they do the micro-deposits like Hubert does. Still, they're technically not actually Me-to-Me Transfers. Me-to-Me Transfers are a proprietary software development of Central 1 Credit Union. Tangerine has their own but it works the same way. Both use the Electronic Funds Transfer system so the "generic," if you will, term for it would be self-to-self, bank-to-bank transfers.

More information on the specific self-to-self, bank-to-bank transfer system that Central 1 Credit Union uses called Me-to-Me Transfers is available below, if you're interested:

https://www.central1.com/digital-payments/direct-banking-solutions/memberdirect-me-me-transfer

As far as terms go, I agree it's confusing because there's no common standard terminology. Basically, the "generic" terms go like this:

Electronic Funds Transfer - a type of fund transfer that clears through Payments Canada's Automated Clearing Settlement System, the same system that clears your paper-based cheques

With that, you have two types of transactions, these are the "generic" terms:
- pre-authorized debit (PAD) - DR transaction
- direct deposit (DD) - CR transaction

A pre-authorized credit could be a direct deposit but it's an internal, bank-generated term. It could also refer to a recurring internal transfer between one client and another client of the same bank or just a standing instruction between one's own accounts that don't use ACSS.

Pre-authorized payment is just a bank-specific term for pre-authorized debit. It is the same thing.

When you "push" funds out from, say, your Hubert account at Hubert, it becomes a Direct Deposit (of the EFT system) at your other bank. However, if you "pull" funds in to Hubert from within Hubert but from your other bank, it becomes a Pre-Authorized Debit (called a Fund Transfer sub-type - some banks show the FTD after the bank's name on your transaction history; HSBC Canada does this) that has special rules that say it can't be returned whereas a pre-authorized debit, for say, your FortisBC gas bill (if you're in B.C.), can be returned for any reason up to but not exceeding 90 days after the date of the withdrawal. Useful to know if you have a deceased family member and are trying to get their cell phone bill payment reversed. 😉

Cheers,
Doug

Londonguy said
So before I take them to task again, my question to you is this: is Simplii not adding my Ideal account because there's something in the payment system protocols between these 2 particular FIs that genuinely requires a void cheque even though they have all the Institution/Transit/Account numbers they need, or is Simplii just choosing to not let me do it? The answer would obviously influence the flavour of the next conversation I have with them TIA  

I can give you a fairly complete answer here.

Short answer: nothing in the Canadian payments systems policies and legislation (federal Bills of Exchange Act is one of the governing pieces of legislation, if you're interested) so this would be an institution-specific problem. It could either be procedural "foot-dragging" or a problem with their internal policies. It sounds like it's more the former than the latter.

Longer answer: Since the Canadian payments industry rules and guidelines, as far as I'm aware, don't mention specific requirements to verifying accounts, this is a Proceeds of Crime (Anti-Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing) Act-related law and associated regulation. The Financial Transactions Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) publishes guidelines on the methods acceptable to verify beneficial ownership of related accounts. Current guidelines are actually more liberal than Simplii Financial has put in place as it could be either a cleared, preprinted cheque in your name (in whole or in part, in the case of a joint external chequing account; Payments Canada comes in to play in the case of joint accounts, which require two cheques or one cheque signed by both people whether the account is "joint with right of survivor"/"joint tenants-in-common" and "one to sign" or "both to sign" in terms of debits), a stamped VOID cheque form by the other external bank or even an original customer statement showing the needed information (can also be an original e-Statement PDF), which basically includes the account holder's name, address, account number and bank name, branch name (or transit number) and address. If it doesn't specify the branch address (or vice versa), that's OK because the other can be looked up through Payments Canada's Financial Institutions Directory. That said, Simplii Financial is not breaking the law because they don't have to accept all of those methods, which is kind of frustrating. Those are just methods they can accept, whichever they choose. 🙁

I would follow up with them via secure message, ideally, or by phone and make notes.

Cheers,
Doug

P.S. As an aside, I'm actually keen to transfer my Scotia iTRADE accounts to either Qtrade Investor or Questrade but both call for a scan of one's government-issued photo ID and I've never had to provide that for brokerage accounts. I've repeatedly pointed out that in the case of non-face-to-face account openings, that's not even an accepted form of ID for account and beneficial owner verification. I've yet to hear back from their Compliance term, to whom I cited the relevant provisions of the PCAMLTF Act and related FINTRAC Guidelines. The reason is...I don't want my middle name on my account nor do I want my first name as "Douglas" (as on my photo ID) as I fear they'll add that to my credit report, which I do not want as I've been fortunate to have been able to have all my bank & investment accounts opened thus far without those pieces of information. I wish provincial photo ID-issuing government agencies were permitted to exclude middle names and allow shortened names (like Canadian passports) on the actual public ID cards but keep the legal versions internal for government bodies to access so that I wouldn't have to consider an expensive $140-200 name change process just to change my legal name from "Douglas (middle name) (last name)" to "Doug (last name)". 🙁