Checking account which offers withdrawal notifications

March 3, 2023 7:13 PM

We're looking for a bank which offers a checking account that will send us email notifications when there's a withdrawal from the account over a specified limit. Bank of America offers this feature (it was our old bank.) We switched from BOA to BMO Harris, only to discover that despite BMO hyping their app and digital banking, they don't seem to offer this service. (this feature is important to us- it helped me detect and act upon a bogus >10K withdrawal from our BOA account.)

To forestall questions about "why not just go back to BOA?" Mrs. Larry David Syndrome and I have some political objections to their business practices. We would also like to use a bank with a brick and mortar presence in the Chicagoland area, a reasonable ATM network etc.

posted by Larry David Syndrome to Work & Money (10 answers total)

Chase will send you notifications via email, text, push notification from the mobile app, or all of the above.
posted by theory at 7:23 PM on March 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

Are you sure BMO can't do this? Pretty sure this is a quite common feature these days.
posted by kickingtheground at 7:39 PM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

PNC does this.
posted by bookmammal at 8:19 PM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

At US Bank you can set up notifications for all kinds of alerts.
posted by mezzanayne at 9:11 PM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure this is the right part of BMO but it looks like they offer it for your bank account as well as debit cards. I searched on "transaction alerts"
posted by metahawk at 9:14 PM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I appreciate the tips on trying to make it work with BMO, but I just can't seem to find a way of accomplishing this with their website. (Which, I might add, doesn't even seem to offer a search function from the logged in portion of the site.) You can click on something labeled "account alerts" but that just allows you to specify where you want your account alerts to go (i.e. phone # or email address) but you can't specify which events trigger alerts. The debit card activity monitoring thing is in the form of push alerts to the app which is not going to work for me for a number of reasons (don't want app running in the background 24/7, I have a shared Apple ID with my spouse, etc, etc.) Also, I'm not just interested in debit card transactions.
I'll investigate Chase, PNC and US Bank. Mrs. LDS already has an account at Chase, so that might be the path of least resistance. Thanks to all who responded!
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 9:54 PM on March 3, 2023

UsAA sends me a text every morning at 8:30 telling me my current checking account balance. Does your bank do an alert like that?
posted by bendy at 11:18 PM on March 3, 2023

Confirming Chase does this no problem. I have mine set at $125 for similar reasons.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:34 AM on March 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you're concerned about ethical practices, you should know that my credit union does this. There's probably a brick and mortar credit union in your area that does it as well.
posted by aniola at 8:58 AM on March 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

P.S. Credit unions all share an ATM network. And many of them reimburse you for ATM fees from out-of-network ATMs.
posted by aniola at 9:00 AM on March 4, 2023 [2 favorites]