We've been a customer of Washington Federal since they acquired First Mutual Bank.
If I was rating this branch alone I'd give it 3 stars. The current branch manager is quite good and the current tellers are okay. But if you bank at Washington Federal you have to deal with REST of the bank, and if I could give it negative stars, I would.
I won't list all the nonsense we've dealt with over the years -- inability to change the name of an account, tellers that don't know what they are doing -- and focus on the most recent in a long line of head-scratching things this bank has done that just makes you wonder how they've stayed in business this long.
Recently, they did an "upgrade" of their online banking. For us, that upgrade locked us out of our account. There was no warning this was coming. Attempts to do a password recovery revealed that the phone number associated with the account was incorrect and one never associated with our company.
After several calls to customer support trying to get to the bottom of it, someone said, "maybe this is due to our online banking upgrade," which is obviously where we should have started.
Fast forward three or four calls and a few days (with a couple of representatives not getting back to us) and we discover the problem is our account is supposed to be transferred to a "Treasury Express" account due to the upgrade. This required me to drive down to the branch and sign new account paperwork.
I do that, and finally, after about a dozen calls and nearly two weeks of not having access to our BUSINESS banking account, we get access. Whew. That was tough.
But wait. There's more.
When we get into the account we discover that, guess what? No access to online billpay. Must have been a setting somewhere, right? Nope. The online billpay didn't transfer over correctly for a small handful of accounts -- apparently we were one of the lucky ones. Nobody told us about this.
We were told online billpay "should be done by the end of the week," but in the meantime, we could go into the branch and have them "print some things out." After pushing back, a representative called us and sent us all our billpay activity, our list of payees and the days of the month they would need to be paid. If we wanted to pay via Washington Federal, we would have to print and mail checks. Yay.
We were first told billpay would be working by the end of the week two and a half weeks ago. As of today, no communication from the bank and no billpay.
If you own a business, overlay this experience with your own company. How disruptive would it have been. How much staff time would you have wasted? What other things could you have been doing if you weren't dealing with this?
I don't know how any company could responsibly pick Washington Federal as their business bank. While I assume they will eventually get their online banking kinks worked out, this was not just a one-time mistake made by Washington Federal.
This is part of a long-term pattern of mistakes and poor business practices at Washington Federal, and failing to execute the basics of business banking well. This online upgrade isn't the problem, it's a byproduct of a systemic breakdown across customer service, IT, business banking and every other department involved.
Don't do your business banking here. There are plenty of other options available. read more