I decided to stick with Wells Fargo after all.

(apologies for the long post)

The feature of online-only banks that I can't live with is making deposits. If I have to mail my deposits in, I'm setting myself up for the time when I need something to hit my account fast. Until the online banks accept deposits from my local ATMs, and post them over night, I'm sticking with what I have.

I went back and forth about Etrade, and in the end, I decided that I just don't need another bank account.

Wells Fargo has made two mistakes for me over a period of twenty years: 1. In the early days of the their bill-pay (when I would manage the transactions from Quicken on my computer and dial in via modem), they double paid my mortgage one month. I watched a second payment go through my account a couple of days after the first. Imagine my surprise! They couldn't explain it.

2. Recently I wanted to try their auto pay service with my mortgage, which is where you make two payments per month and pay off the capital faster. They screwed this up, is the best I can say. The account I set up to link to this service wasn't able to make electronic transfers, and they didn't call me to let me know that my mortgage wasn't getting paid! I got a late notice, and again, imagine my surprise. The customer service for their mortgage auto pay seems incompetent. I dropped the whole idea.

So I'll just stay away from services that they're not doing very well. I've read that many people find their online bill pay to work fine. I use the web-based one, works fine.

The other problem with Wells is that they're going to continue to merge with other banks. Each time they merge, there's a good change they're going to muck with everyone's account: put you through a "conversion". This can be unpleasant, because under the covers, lots of software engineers are changing the code and mistakes happen. I used to be one of those software engineers, so I know all too well what goes on. But this is hard to get away from in the banking industry.