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Review 2/3/2010
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After banking with, and putting up with, OneUnited Bank for over a year I can confidently say that you should explore one of the many other options available for your banking needs. OneUnited offers false advertising, dishonest business practices to unjustly extract fees, customer service that has been (in my multiple interactions with them) slow, unknowledgeable, or rude. And all this dealing with a simple online high yield savings account. And I'm not an idiot, I'm young, tech-savvy, I work in the financial services industry and generally am patient and do not overreact for issues like this. I do almost everything online, almost all shopping/banking/travel planning/research/work etc. And this is the first company that I've had to file a formal complaint for with BBB.
I have high yield online savings accounts with the following banks: ING Direct, FNBO Direct, Emigrant Direct, UFB Direct. They all offer no fee, no minimum balance requirement.
OneUnited Bank advertised the same. First, setting up the account with OneUnited was by far the slowest and most difficult among all of these competitors. I received no confirmation after submitting my information online. It took multiple attempts and several day to hear back from customer service when I contacted them (mind you, this is just so I can give them money...you would think they'd be responsive). Their were errors on their website when trying to confirm the initial deposit.
After this bad start, I did not feel comfortable transferring significant funds and actually ended up moving some funds out of the account after a month or so. Everything was fine for several months. Then they changed the terms without my consent or proper notice. The new terms include a minimum balance and a fee for not maintaining that balance, completely contradicting their original advertising and account terms. The only notification was a letter included with only one month's paper statement, which I did not check every month because I signed up for an online account with no fees. I understand that the statements reflected this information and perhaps this was their only legal responsibility to customers when communicating a major change to the terms. However, this is certainly not the appropriate way to force a change on customers. I was not asked if I wanted to merge into a different account with different terms; it was forced. They call this an "Internet Product" on their website, but I received no communications online (through email which they have on file, through a special alert when signing in to my account, or through the online account message box). Had I been given clear notifications and the option to merge my account or withdraw assets, I believe these charges would be fair. That is not how OneUnited decided to conduct business.
I believed a refund was due with the understanding that if I choose to keep the account, new terms and fess apply. Customer service only provided 2 refunds though I was charged 6 times. And the Supervisor was rude when discussing this topic.
UFB Direct had a similar policy change at the same time and started charging me a small fee. They also started charging me a paper statement fee, without notifying my online when this would take effect. HOWEVER, after discussing with customer service (albeit three times), they refunded ALL charges that occurred over a 6-month period AND converted my account to a different type that did not have these fees. Again, I do not like that they forced new terms upon me without consent and in a shady manner in order to extract fees, but UFB's customer service handled the situation in a much more professional way.
There are plenty of other options. I strongly suggest using any of them beside OneUnited. I have had excellent experience with ING, Emigrant and FNBO.
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