As someone in favor of using cash, sending letters by USPS, and other old-school customs, I used digital technology today to perform a task that used to get me out of the house. I installed the Bank of America mobile banking app (see screen capture) on my smartphone and conveniently deposited a check, complete with confirmation, without ever leaving home.
That’s nothing new for younger folks, but it was a novel step for an older person like me.
My reason was to avoid an otherwise unnecessary trip to Silverdale this week, and I would have endured a certain amount of online hassle to meet that goal. However, setting up the app and depositing a check were straightforward. BoA deserves credit for that.
If you have accounts at different banks that you use for different purposes (I have two plus a brokerage account), inevitably you are going to need to move money around. Earlier this summer, I learned how to transfer money electronically from my brokerage account to BoA. Kitsap Bank (my other bank) also allows similar electronic transfers, but the error messages I got were too cryptic for me to figure out why setup didn’t work.
As far as moving funds from BoA to Kitsap Bank (or the other way around), my approach has always been to write checks at home, visit the bank branches by car, and use the ATM machines there for deposits/withdrawals. I haven’t been able to use Zelle for this task.
Most of the time car-based banking doesn’t seem like a waste of time and gas since I can usually invent additional reasons for driving to Silverdale or wherever the closest bank branches are. Stopping at the bank might not be fun, but it does get me out of the house. Just not this week.
The irony of using BoA’s mobile app to deposit a check is that you still need to write a check (or need to cash a third-party check). That means making an entry in your check register and keeping the check until it clears. So perhaps my accomplishment today isn’t as big a digital change as I thought, and completely converting to the BoA mobile banking app might be a long way off. Plus, for completeness, I should install Kitsap Bank’s mobile banking app.
But skipping the drive to Silverdale gave me a chance to write a blog entry instead.
Mud Bay Blog 