Bucks Blog: Web Sites for Choosing a New Bank

Even though the country’s largest banks have dropped plans to charge fees for debit card use, a movement encouraging customers to consider switching to community banks or credit unions remains energized. Promoters of Bank Transfer Day are urging dissatisfied big bank customers to open accounts at smaller institutions on Saturday.

So if you want to consider alternatives to a big national bank, where should you look? Here are some Web-based tools aimed at helping you narrow your search.

The Credit Union National Association, working with state-based credit union leagues, maintains a site that lets you search by ZIP code for a credit union — a financial institution structured as a nonprofit cooperative.

You may still have to do more research, however. There are thousands of credit unions, but many are organized to serve specific groups of people — say, employees of a certain company. The search engine gives detailed membership criteria for many institutions, but not all. So in some cases you may have to call to see if you qualify. You can also access the search tool via another credit-union sponsored Web site.

You can also try the Web site Nerdwallet for its Credit Union Finder, which lists more than 400 credit unions, many of which are “community” credit unions, where anyone living, working or learning in a certain area or group of counties can join, said Nerdwallet’s founder, Tim Chen. He said in an e-mail that such credit unions tended to be larger in terms of assets and easier for many people to join. (Nerdwallet’s listings are free to the credit unions,  Mr. Chen said.)

BancVue offers a tool that lets you find community banks and credit unions offering high-interest-rate checking accounts.

The Move Your Money project, which encourages switching to credit unions as well as community banks, lets you search by ZIP code and also provides a check list for making the switch (including steps like rerouting direct deposits and contacting companies that directly take money out of your old account). Online banking is convenient, but adds steps when you want to disentangle yourself from your old checking account. So proceed carefully.

A site going online on Thursday aims to use crowdsourcing to provide more detailed information about both credit unions and community banks. Banxodus, an effort by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, says it has more than 7,500 institutions in its database, which was created with the help of a few thousand volunteer researchers, and expects the list to grow after the site goes public.

“A lot of people are inspired to move, but don’t know where to move their money to,” said Neil Sroka, a spokesman for the committee, a liberal group. The site aims to help customers find “good guy banks” in their communities, he said. The initiative’s organizers encourage prospective customers to ask their new banks tough questions — not just, “How many A.T.M.’s do you have?” but also, “Do you keep the loans you make, or do you sell them to investors?”

If you know of other helpful sites for researching smaller financial institutions, please share the information in the comments section.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=935e6ab0d4ca9224b9c2b57cdeb7a512