My wife and I have been using ING Direct for many years now. ING was a ‘virtual’ bank, with access online only, with no physical banks you could walk into.
Having no physical locations kept their costs very low, and they were able to pass those cost savings on to their customers by offering very aggressive interest bearing savings accounts.
The main advantages for us to use ING were that they paid higher interest on savings accounts than most banks, and it was also really easy to create several ‘virtual’ accounts to pigeonhole your money into for various reasons…like a ‘New House’ account to save for a new house, an ‘ Auto Repairs’ account, school, and more. All of it was handled online through our web browser.
We also had a checking account with them (they call it Electric Orange) which had an ATM card and also had a little interest earnings.
With the recent purchase of ING Direct by Capital One I guess we’ll gain some physical locations and maybe some other services, but I wonder what will happen to the original reasons we went with ING in the first place.
I guess we’ll give it some time and see how it goes.
