Was the Laurentian Bank 3.3% savings account a bait and switch? | Page 2 | LBC Digital | Discussion forum

Personally, I am grateful for the opportunity afforded to me by B2B bank and Laurentian Bank. I also agree that it gave me butterflies when some of the online banking features do not appear to work at night i.e linking and transferring money. But always the next day, they did finally work. It is a new system for them , and they are obviously using us for their Beta Testing. As long as our cash does not disappear it may be worth it for some but not all people. A new rate of 2.8% is nothing to sneeze at either. Their digital online banking interface is less than mediocre but again so long as it delivers the highest rates who cares? But if the rates are no longer competitive then i have no reason to stick around with this bank as it is otherwise a mediocre experience in terms of service.

It technically may not be a bait and switch but only 3.5 months for LBC Digital at that 3 3 percent rate was very disappointing. I would not have put in the effort to get everything working if I had known it was going to only be for such a short time. And there were people on RFD who had money disappear into vapor for weeks until they could get LBC to sort it out for them . That is not a comforting feeling. On the other hand the CSRs were nice to deal with so maybe LBC will mature into a decent bank if they can sort out their technical difficulties.

When I spoke with the CSRs from B2B bank they were fine. They said one can only link with other banks from their side not the other way around which i found odd ? Anyways, I set up a test deposit from B2B to Duca on February 20 and i was impressed to see the 2 small test deposits show up the next day in my new "Earn MOre winter savings special account" with DUCA .
The CSR from Duca was good and warned me that DUCA only accepts a maximum transfer of $200 000. Anything over that amount would be rejected. She also suggested I privately negotiate with DUCA a week before the 3% special expires (on May 30th) and explore if they can continue to offer the same rate so as to retain the customer's funds. Sounds good to me ! No need to shop around further then ?

"When I spoke with the CSRs from B2B bank they were fine. They said one can only link with other banks from their side not the other way around which i found odd ?"

Yes, this is correct. I tried unsuccessfully to create a link from a "Big 5" bank to B2B/LBC.

It's nice that one of the traditional older banks is starting a digital presence. Laurentian Bank was founded in 1846.

Laurentian Bank is the 9th largest bank in Canada with about 45.89 billion in assets, 8th place is HSBC Canada with 95.81 billion, National Bank is in 7th place with 262.47 billion and Desjardins is in 6th place with 275.1 billion.

In comparison EQ Bank has 32 billion in assets and Alterna Bank has 8 billion in assets.

Norman1 said
I have not tried it the other way. DUCA requires a VOID cheque or equivalent and B2B does not provide a specimen of any kind, so cannot try BUT if you have another bank that accepts just the bank ID info, the info for B2B is ... Bank # 618 Transit# 06231, if you want to try a pull initiated from another bank pulling from B2B.

Report back if anyone tries this.  

Unless B2B's platform won't let you anymore, take 2 minutes to open their online chequing account. The void cheque generation feature only works if you have a chequing account. You can then create links anywhere you want to the chequing account instead, which also drives around any potential HISA TOS issues.

Once you can print a void cheque, you're off to the races. I faxed DUCA their required Me-to-Me paperwork for my LBC account and my link was up in less than 24 hours. You just have to remember whenever pulling money out that you also need to move those same funds over from your HISA into chequing so that everything will clear