“One in four French people pay bank incident costs during the year”, recalls Matthieu Robin, bank and insurance policy officer at the UFC-Que Choisir consumer association. The overdraft, and the litany of costs that result from it, concerns all profiles, regardless of age, socio-professional situation and income. And the bill can be steep: in the event of an unauthorized overdraft or beyond the planned amount, an intervention commission is billed.
The bill is legally capped at eight euros per transaction and 80 euros per month. To which are added the agios: the borrowing interest rate is between 7% (authorized overdraft) and 18% (unauthorized overdraft) depending on the banks. It is often difficult to know because establishments do not play the game of transparency. “The information rarely appears in the networks’ price brochures. Banks are content to refer the client to their branch to obtain the detail “, confirms Saïd Fadil, project manager at Meilleurebanque.com.
Diving into the red can also entail other costs, with names as barbaric as they are incomprehensible to the customer facing a fait accompli: “newsletter costs for unauthorized debtor account”, “costs by seizure-attribution” or again “costs of prior information letter for bad check”.
Without forgetting the famous “direct debit rejection fees”. “These are particularly painful, because, after a first rejection, the direct debit is presented again to the account a few days later, and can again be rejected”, adds Matthieu Robin, who pleads for the elimination of this duplicate.
40% of the annual total
The invoicing of incidents is one of the main items of bank charges. Thus, our “employee” profile settles an average of 48 euros in overdraft fees during the year, for five overruns of its authorized overdraft, which corresponds to 40% of its total bank fees for the year. A high proportion, because our employee also consumes few banking products and services.
However, a few precautions are enough to lighten the bill. It is recommended that you negotiate an overdraft authorization, and review the amount occasionally if your income increases. This will allow you to limit the intervention commissions invoiced beyond the authorized amount. In addition, this is an opportunity to think about changing banks to switch to an online establishment, because the latter do not charge an intervention commission, like BforBank, Boursorama Banque, Fortuneo, ING, Hello Bank! or Orange Bank.
Even more radical solution: become a client of an establishment without an overdraft authorization; like EKO by CA, Ma French Bank or Nickel. This does not resolve the issue of costs in the event of a rejection of a direct debit, but at least makes it possible to avoid intervention fees. Systematic authorization cards are, more generally, used by many customers as a budget control tool.