As each day goes by and humanity keeps evolving, the usage of banks and bank accounts is getting even more common. The times when people used to store their money in safes or keep them at home are long behind us. Even our grandparents have multiple bank accounts. Using banks has never been easier, we have mobile apps, online services and what not. You don’t even have to visit a bank to draw or send funds anymore.
Everything is being automated, and that’s the case with bank decision making as well. But what kind of decision making you might ask? Well, when you try to open a bank account or try to score credit, the bank needs to decide if they really want to grant you that permission.
Nobody likes to have un-trustworthy customers, so they have to carefully examine each request and even sometimes take a “peek” into the customer’s history. But how can they do this for every person when there are so many people making requests every single day? That’s where automation comes in to “save the day”. Or does it? There are services such as ChexSystems that keep track of a customer’s history and previous experiences with banks, and makes a report that has a score from 100 to 900. Then it sends it to the bank and the computer makes a decision if they should either accept or reject your request.
As much as this can be helpful and make banks “decide” faster what they should do with your requests, it can sometimes make mistakes and many people get “blacklisted” by this system for some insignificant issue they’ve had in the past which might’ve not even been their fault. That’s why there are non-ChexSystems Banks anymore.
Let’s talk about the pros and cons of ChexSystems
Like we mentioned earlier, the biggest advantage of banks that use systems like these is the ability to bring much faster “judgments” and prevent people from waiting forever to get their application accepted, or rejected. The thing is, these decisions that the automated system makes are not always right. We are all humans and make mistakes, it can happen to anyone to miss a payment date. Same goes for the people who work at the bank. Sometimes the problem is on their end, but ChexSystems will still “capture” this issue and possibly use it against you the next time you try and use a bank service.
That’s why some banks created an option called “second chance”. This serves to give exactly that, a second chance to people that have been rejected by something like ChexSystems. The problem is if you don’t find such bank or there are simply no other banks in your area except the one that strictly trusts ChexSystems only, you can find yourself in a pretty difficult situation. This is because the system keeps your “negative history” for up to five years.
If you are reading this and wondering what “grade” do you have on this ChexSystems list, there is an option to check on their official website. Just fill out a form and you should get a statistic with your “performance”.
