Bank account bonuses are a little slow for me this year after going overboard last year, so I decided yesterday to try Port Bank, portbanking.com, but you need the mobile app to do anything. A $100 bonus for $500 deposit, but you need a referral code. The attraction was an unlimited 3% on savings with a $1k month deposit, and my referral person told me any ACH works for that.
Porte is a "fintech' bank product, similar to Chime, and like Chime uses a company called Plaid for ACH external transfers. So yesterday I open the account and link my PNC bank account, which requires you to provide your login info, and then link your debit card for "instant" transfers. So this morning I try to deposit $510 from my PNC debit card to fund the account; get an "over limit" message. OK, so I try $300, over limit. $250? Nope, $200 is my limit, so I try that. I promptly get a "transaction declined" message. Hmmm, I have over $1k there, so I log into PNC and sure enough, a $200 pending debit card transaction from them. So I call Porte, finally get a live person who assures me my debit card transaction was declined, I tell him that's rather odd as I have $200 debit card transaction at PNC. All he can tell me is that it shows declined on their end. So I tell him to close the account, less than 24 hours old.
How do you possibly screw up a debit card transaction??? You either get an approval code, or you get a declined. Period. I did call PNC, since it's pending it will either fall off this evening or go through. If it goes through then I can dispute.
It might have been better if I'd waited to close Porte to see if the debit transfer goes through, but patience has never been my strong suit. Worst banking app I've ever used. After logging into the app it asks you to create a PIN for faster access, done that 10 times now, it never saves it. And I tried find ATMs to see if I can add cash that way, it promptly shows me Austin TX. No way to input a zip code, Austin is all you get. I'm outside of Tucson, but my phone is T-Mobile which usually shows my location as southern CA, so how they come up with Austin is beyond me.
/rant
