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GE Capital Bank Savings Account Review
GE Capital Bank Savings account review 2024: fees, APR/APY interest rates/high yields. New client promotions, service, cons/pros.
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GE Capital Bank
GE Capital Bank is a bank that is, surprisingly, run by GE. This bank isn’t very well known at the moment, but will be soon for one reason: their interest rate. GE Capital Bank offers savings account holders a whopping 1.05% interest per year. That’s more than any other bank out there. But is it worth it? This article will go in depth on the usability of GE Capital Bank’s website, the ease of linking to other accounts, other services they offer, accessing funds, fees and close with a summary.
Usability
First impressions of GE Capital Bank’s website are positive. The website has a clean white and blue design. The main page sticks with the very clean modern theme, showing only account balances and recent transactions.
Unfortunately for this site, looks aren’t everything. Starting at the beginning, the login process is clunky at best. There are three different screens that need to be clicked through: one for the username, one for the security question, and one for the password. This needs to happen every time a user logs in, even after clicking the “register this computer” checkbox.
Once a user manages to log in they are greeted with the aforementioned modern website layout. Unfortunately, there isn’t much else they can do on this site. Aside from account information, tax form, and transfer fund links there is very little to be found on this site. Then again, GE just recently started their new bank offering and is still getting established as a competitor. They may have more options in the future.
Linking Other Accounts
GE Capital Bank has one of the quickest, most simple systems to link an external account to the existing GE Savings Account. They offer two verification methods: Trial Deposits and Instant Verification.
Trial deposits are the standard way banks have linked external accounts for decades. The initiating bank (in this case, GE Capital) makes two small “trial deposits” into the account specified at the time of linking. The account owner then needs to confirm the correct amount of the trail deposits. This shows GE Capital that the account owner does, in fact, have access to the linked account. Users using this method have to wait around two days before the process is complete.
The instant verification method is much newer and hasn’t been implemented at many financial institutions yet. With this method, GE Capital establishes a secure connection to the other bank’s website. Afterwards, the user simply logs in with their username and password for that institution. Once the information is confirmed the connection is established. GE still hasn’t worked out all of the snags with this method. Some institutions that they say should work don’t, which can be frustrating.
Other Services
This section is in here to point out the fact that GE Capital Bank only offers two products: a basic savings account and a CD. This means are no “goals” that you can use to break up your account value like there are at other modern institutions like Betterment and Simple. This savings account can only be used to hold money and transfer it to other institutions.
Their CDs have somewhat competitive rates: 1.10% for a 12-month term and 2.25% for a 5-year term. Due to abysmally low CD interest rates across the board these rates are still unattractive, despite being competitive. Is it really worth the extra 0.05% to have money tied up in a CD for a year?
Accessing Funds
As mentioned in the previous section, GE only offers CDs and Savings accounts. This means that, by default, there are no checking accounts. This, in turn, means no debit cards, no checkbooks, and no ATMs. By virtue of being an online bank, GE Capital doesn’t have any brick and mortar branches for customers to visit either. All of that makes accessing funds more difficult than it would be almost anywhere else.
GE’s lack of a mobile app for managing accounts makes it even more difficult for people are on the go. The most major impact of this is that there is no way to deposit checks to a GE Savings account. This alone makes GE is a poor choice for a primary bank account.
After everything said above, there are two ways to take money out of a GE Capital Savings Account: an electronic bank transfer or a wire transfer. Both of these take a couple of days to fully process. Thankfully, there are no fees associated with transferring money.
Fees
One of the biggest draws of GE Capital Bank, outside of their great interest rate, is their lack of fees. GE Capital charges no fees. No withdraw fees, no transfer fees, and no minimum balance fees. This would be great; if the account uses weren’t so limited.
Summary
In summary, GE Capital Bank offers a wonderful promise: great interest rates with no fees. Unfortunately, it is unable to deliver on some other online banking essentials. By making it impossible to withdraw money without another banking institution, GE Capital Bank relegates itself as a “secondary” bank account; at best.
Perhaps GE Capital Bank’s only logical place in a person’s financial strategy is as an emergency fund. If used as an emergency fund, customers wouldn’t have to withdraw money very often and would enjoy one of the best interest rates around. Outside of that one use, it is hard to recommend this bank above others.
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