Scotia’s online-only so called “High Interest” savings account offers 0.75% with minimum $5000 balanse, while ING gives you 1.2% with no minimums.

The real option for no-fee checking accounts are credit unions, indeed! Check, for example, Coast Capital Savings: https://www.coastcapitalsavings.com/Personal/Banking/Chequing_Accounts/Free_Chequing_Free_Debit/

Still it doesn’t annoy me as much because I realize the ad is quite old. When it was first aired, ING did have free ATM withdrawals. I forget the details but I think they refunded the ATM fees of 1 or 2 withdrawals per month. The ad doesn’t specifically say ATM fees, so I thought they are now referring to other fees that are levied on some savings accounts even today. For example, take Royal Bank Day to Day Savings account:

http://www.rbcroyalbank.com/products/deposits/day-to-day-savings.html

First, it hardly pays any interest – between 0.02% to 0.10%. It does allow you one free debit per monthly cycle but beyond that you pay $1.00 each.

I tend to cut ING some slack. They were the first to innovate with high interest online savings. For many years, they were the only game in town. Their ad strategy must have worked — they gained a significant market share that today pretty much everyone offers a competitive online savings account.

I haven’t seen their mortgage ad, so can’t comment on it.

In one ING ad, a woman is seen almost screaming a complaint to camera about being charged for withdrawing money from her own bank account. Based on her walking down the street, one assumes that she has been charged for using an ATM. There are two half-lies in this scenario. Firstly, I have never been charged a dollar for withdrawing money from my own account in Canada. You only incur ATM charges if you withdraw money from a third-party ATM. ATM charges are entirely avoidable. That’s half-lie number one. The second misleading point is the implication that you don’t get charged for withdrawing money from ING accounts. Well, yes that’s true. Sort of. But then you CAN NOT withdraw money from ING accounts using an ATM so therefore there is no opportunity to be charged a fee for withdrawing money from an ING account.
The fact is that if you have an ING account, you have to transfer your money from your ING account to a trading bank account before you can access it. And then you are right back where you started, aren’t you?

Note that with my HSBC account, I can access my account through their branches (which, admittedly, are few and far between – I’d have to drive 10 minutes to my nearest branch in West Kelowna).

The second example of an offensive ING ad is the one in which the over-the-top host asks if there shouldn’t be a mortgage for savers; the implication, I guess, being that ING will look more favourably on potential customers for mortgages if they have a track record of saving with ING. The rest of the implication is that other banks don’t do this. Sorry, another lie. ALL banks will look more favourably on mortgage applicants if they have a banking history with them than if they just walked off the street to apply for a mortgage. They always have.

One could do this analysis with every one of their ads but you get the point.

As I said before, I find any ad truly offensive that resorts to this sort of in-your-face, screeching and almost wining dialogue full of lies and half-truths an insult to my intelligence. I just assumed others would be equally offended.

Frankly, the only ads I find more offensive than ING’s are the Grey Power ads, but that’s another story.

“Most big banks have a lot of service charges and most of their savings accounts have crappy interest” doesn’t really seem offensive, unless the ads have changed since I last saw them.