A few months ago I got fed up with paying extravagant fees to my bank just for the privilege of being able to write cheques. So I decided to give "my" bank a little healthy competition and split my accounts up.

Here's a bit of background. I've banked at the same bank for many years (probably 12 years or so). They have made a lot of money off of me over the years. But the thing that really irritated me was the basic day-to-day bank chequing account that I had.

Admittedly, it had some good features. It offered unlimited chequing, unlimited ABM withdrawals (at their machines), ABM withdrawals out of the country, monthly statements, and an attached line of credit, and probably a few other features that I never used. But the fees! They recently increased them again to about $28 per month. That's $336 per year - way too much in my books. I had actually been paying those fees for a few years and had been too inert to bother moving. And if I ever had a small positive balance, the bank just paid pennies in interest in my favour.

I finally got around to moving my accounts. The first thing I did was to open two accounts - a chequing account and a savings account - at President's Choice Financial. President's Choice is actually the name of a "quasi-generic" line of foods sold in Loblaws and Superstore grocery stores. PC Financial is within the CIBC (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) group so it's not exactly an upstart. PC Financial has its only branches in grocery stores - Loblaws and Superstore, but they are relatively easy to deal with online. They charge no fees on their chequing account no matter how many cheques you write and the cheques are free.

But the real reason I switched was because of their savings account. You can link a savings account and move money back and forth via the internet (with a one-day delay on taking money out) and it pays 2.15% interest on your balance. That may not sound like much, but it compares very favourably to the 0.05% or 0.1% (that's not 1% - that's one-tenth of one percent) at most of the major banks - including CIBC, PC Financial's parent. Now, at long last, there's a viable alternative to the big banks which have had a stranglehold on banking in Canada for so many years.

I note too that there are other financial institutions out there with attractive rates on savings accounts - notably ING Direct, and ICICI Bank of Canada. More on those in a later article.

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