Changing the Route
With all of the push for online banking, changing a routing number has got to be one of the most god-awful things to go through. Why does every site make it so freaking hard to change the number that indicates I want to send them money? And this is just the credit cards. I haven’t even started on all of the companies that automatically pull money out of the checking account. But I am tired tonight, and this will have to be enough.
#### Citi
* You must change your checking account number separately for each AutoPay account.
* You cannot change an AutoPay checking account number if the next payment is within six days. No, you can’t change it for every payment following the one just coming up.
* When changing a click to pay checking account number, you (sometimes) must enter the three digit code off the back of the card and the account “code word”. The code word is never otherwise used and the website will give you no hints. (If you call in however, the helpful CSR will give you enough hints to get the right answer.)
#### Chase
* You cannot add a checking account as a payment source if you already have an account with the same account number (but different routing number).
* You cannot add a payment account until you select which account you want to add it to. Once you do, however, you can select to have the change “applied to all accounts”.
* When you are deleting old accounts from the manage bank accounts screen, after deleting a checking account, you have to navigate back to where you were. There are no bread crumbs or automatic way to return you back to the manage bank accounts screen.
* User IDs are required to be 8 characters or more—for your security.
* Each primary cardholder must have their own account.
* You can’t delete a bank account that has an automatic payment associated with it. So, instead of being able to change the routing number, I have to delete the automatic payment, delete the bank account, add the bank account, and add the automatic payment. (Even if I could just edit the automatic payment, I couldn’t add the second bank account without deleting the first since they have the same account number. This would be so much simpler if I could just edit the account number in the first place.)
#### Discover Card
* Not an issue. I haven’t had any issues with their website since they got the bright idea of using account login names instead of the 16-digit account number.
#### American Express
* Once I actually found the link to change the checking account number, it was fairly smooth. I don’t think that a website should try to actively hide the link on you though.