The Truth about the Chevy Chase All Access Check Card
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008It’s amazing what you can do with spin. Chevy Chase Bank is promoting a major deficiency as a feature of the All Access Chevy Chase Check Card. The latest promotion leads you to believe they are simplifying your life by putting all your bank accounts onto one piece of plastic. They equate it to being able to carry your entire music library around in your pocket.
Here’s the difference: it would be like being able to carry your entire music library around in your pocket, but only being able to listen to one song. You can have as many as you want on the MP3 player, but you can only ever listen to the first song, (unless you went online or to a kiosk or on the phone and requested that your MP3 player switch a different song to the first song position).
The All Access Chevy Chase Check Card does bundle all your accounts onto one card, but forces you to choose only one account as the primary account of the card. This is the only account that can be used in the real world: at restaurants, at gas pumps, at convenience stores or at any ATM that is not a Chevy Chase ATM. The other accounts: your other Checking, your Savings, your Home Equity Loan are associated with the same card, but are completely unreachable.
The only way to get to these accounts is to call their phone system or online banking and transfer the money. This means you need to either know what you want to purchase before you go out and transfer the necessary funds from the secondary to the primary account, or have enough money in the primary account to float the bill until such time as you can get online or on the phone with the bank to make the transfer.
No matter how you slice it, it’s an inconvenient two step process - 1) paying and 2) transferring.
I contacted Chevy Chase customer service and told them that All Access was not for me, and to please de-couple my individual and joint checking accounts, and send me separate Check Cards for each. The representative, (and subsequently her supervisor and her supervisor), all gave the same response – this is not possible, it goes against Chevy Chase Bank policy.
I was astounded to find out this wasn’t an oversight, but a policy, and am more appalled to hear it now being spun by their marketing department as a benefit. If you are comfortable only being able to access a primary account, then it will work brilliantly for you. But if you are like me, and wish to be able to access your money from any of your accounts when you need it, you will find this mandated approach by Chevy Chase extremely frustrating.
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