Too Big to Fail vs. Too Big to be Intelligent

All over the news here in So Cal the past couple of days is the notion that banco de America is about to access a $5 monthly fee to use your debit card in one of their ATM's - terminally stupid of them BTW.

Once the ATM was developed back in the early ‘70’s, Banks realized they could transfer many 'high touch' transactions to these machines. More accuracy, significant reduction in overhead (no longer needed would be 97% of their tellers, teller  supervisors and assistant operation officers) – all of those costs would be gone! Plus, they could have ATM’s anywhere, and everywhere where there wasn’t a brick and mortar branch. Next most bank hurried to get them deployed, actually BofA was one the slowest ones out here.

Now they’re saying they want to revert back to the pre-ATM overhead, driving many of their current debit card customers back into the bank, using their checking accounts instead of debit card.  Some idiot shot himself in the foot with this decision, no doubt.