I’m the COO at PerkStreet. I’m sorry for the trouble you’ve had with your account- each of the items you’ve encountered are efforts to eliminate fraud, not to limit the amount you can earn. We’re continuing to work with our banking services partner to reduce the friction felt by customers without increasing the amount of fraud. One of the things we’ve done is to waive the balance requirement for the first 3 months so good customers can earn 2% while they build their balances even with these constraints in place.

I’d appreciate the opportunity to chat with you about how this can be better handled by customer service and use it as an opportunity to better educate our team. If you will drop me a note to jhenrichs -at- perkstreet.com, I’d appreciate your time.

As you noted in #1 / #2, the limits change as our relationship with you grows. One thing you can do to get money into your account more quickly is to initiate the transfer from your existing institution where the fact that you own the account is assured through possession of the username and password of that account.

For the daily limits you mention in #3, many banks (including BoA) have limits to prevent accounts from getting cleaned out. You can see how consistent this is across banks: http://bit.ly/C3GCt and it is an area we are working to innovate.

On your last point, the first time a check is received it is held until the funds clear before they are made available.

I hope this helps clarify the “why” things happened although it doesn’t completely alleviate the pain of the “what” happens as banks try to prevent fraud.

I look forward to touching base and getting more of your feedback.

(1) They have a limit of $1500 on incoming online transfers in an entire *month*! They don’t tell you about this anywhere except when you actually try to move money into your account. When I called them about it, they said that they have this restriction for new customers and I was still in my first month. After a couple more calls, I realized that they will increase this limit to $2500 after six months.

Stated reason: Security.
Suspected motive: To limit the amount of money you can spend to get cashback.

(2) They have a limit of $500 on outgoing online transfers. So, say you move $5000 into your account to get 2% cashback. You are stuck with that money with them for the rest of the month (unless you adopt a slower paper check route).

(3) They have a limit of $1500 on daily expenses and explicitly say on their website that it can be waived simply by making a phone call. I had to book two one-way international flight tickets that cost a total of over $1500. I booked these and called them to waive the limit. They refused to do so because I was still in my first month. There is no notice about waivers not being allowed in the first month anywhere. As a result, I have to now spend much more money re-booking that ticket just because PerkStreet does not allow me to spend my own money.

Stated reason: Security for new customers. They claim that all banks have spending limits on debit cards. Really? Bank of America did not.

Suspected motive: Limiting spending => limiting cashback.

(4) When I tried to circumvent the limitation in (1) above to move more money into my account using FedEx, there was another surprise! The first FedEx check takes not 1 day as stated, but about 9 days for some reason. Again, some vague security reason that is incomprehensible to rational beings is given as an explanation.

Bottomline: It is not easy to get much cashback because of their restrictive policies on what you can do with your money. And they make it harder to move money out of the account while not giving any interest on it. As for the 5% cashback, they are on such specific and tiny items that I have never been able to get 5% cashback so far.

Our offer requirements are straightforward and we don’t believe they’re all that hard to meet: For customers who opened their accounts with the intention of using them, this bonus offer has been incredibly easy to earn and we’ve been awarding bonuses regularly. To qualify for the bonus, customers only need to use their account one time every month for the first three months.

To be fair to all of our customers, our offer terms and conditions clearly define a month as 30 days, beginning with the day the account was opened. We did not define a month as a calendar month since it would unfairly penalize customers opening an account late in the month.

If you met the offer requirements and were treated unfairly, please let me know so I can resolve this immediately. You can contact me at jhenrichs ‘@’ perkstreet.com

I checked the Perks section and I have 0 dollars with no indication as to when they’re going to put the $100 into my account.

Anyone else left holding the bag here?

Shady.

Go to your Perks section and you can see the date they will put it in your account.

saladdin

I hope our team in customer service resolved the issue to your satisfaction. I looked into cause of the problem and can assure you that the problem was not a system wide issue. Our infrastructure partner, The Bancorp Bank, is a leading player in the space and together we’ve been able to fulfill all of the bonus offers to date.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any other concerns

Jason Henrichs
Chief Operating Officer

You more then likely will not get the bonus.

There system is junk. Bonus does not get applied to every account because of software glitches.

“Thanks for your email; I apologize for the trouble. Please provide your full name or account number and I will reset your information. I think that there was a processing error in our New Accounts department as several other customers were affected as well.

Best Regards,
Steve
Customer Correspondence
The Bancorp Bank
409 Silverside Rd
Suite 105
Wilmington, DE 19809
302-385-5000″

Check your email/spam folder.

Anyone else get this?

saladdin

I called customer service and they said I needed to make another transfer – which is why I asked why they even asked for the initial funding amount on sign up – but only after I made that transfer did I notice that the initial deposit was “processing” from 2 days ago.

Bottom line: If you sign up and provide initial funding from a bank transfer (vs. credit card) your initial deposit will remain dormant until you verify your account. Once verified, it will process (which contradicts what their customer service told me).

Also, there is a $2.50 charge for any transfers from this account out to another bank. They neglect to state this on their Fees page, however I was suspicious when I had to “opt in” to enable transfers out.