A little relationship marketing story.

We've been getting our finances organized and our advisor suggested that we consider refinancing our mortgage to take advantage of lower rates.  So I put in a call to my bank, leaving a message asking for the penalties that would apply, in particular, the interest rate differential.  This is not something that you can determine from your mortgage paperwork as it depends on the rate you received when you first got your mortgage, relative to the posted rates at the time.  I left a message on Monday, and then another one on Wednesday, with no call back.  So I tweeted the following late yesterday (Thursday) afternoon: 

Want to renegotiate my mortgage. Voice messages to my @td_canada branch haven't been returned, so may renegotiate myself to a new bank.

Within minutes, @td_canada was following me.

Within a couple of hours, they DM'd me.

@jannie_b Hi there, sorry we haven't been responsive - can you DM me info about the branch? Thx for your patience Jannie! ^EB

I DM'd back my name and mortgage number.  First thing this morning, someone from my branch called and gave me all the info I needed. 

I have been banking with Canada Trust for about 30 years.  They were the first financial institution to go to longer, customer-friendly banking hours.  They also seemed to have the most flexible mortgages when we were first getting into the housing market.  But since the merger with TD, my perception is that things have gone downhill. We recently moved our chequing account to PC Financial, as were being dinged with fees at TD, even though we have a large-ish mortgage with them.  If our bank balance dropped below a certain threshold, we were charged fees.  Now, we manage a tight ship, with savings and investments going directly into various accounts, and we don't like to keep much money in our chequing account. Fees and service charges (if any) should be based on your entire relationship with the company, not on an account by account basis. This is the way it worked with Bank of America when we were in Atlanta:  we never paid any banking fees because we had a mortgage with them. In all my experience with relationship marketing in my previous life, you looked at the whole customer, to the extent that was possible.

So now we find ourselves motivated to move the second-last (and biggest) piece of our business away from this bank.  All that will be left is a credit card and that's easy to drop.  It's time to start shopping around, not just for rates, but for a bank that will treat our business holistically.