FSNB, Review

Nothing Special Here.
Overall Rating
Interest Rate and Cost
Office Environment & Staff
Waiting Time
Other Services
by Unbiased, Sep. 09, 2016

FSNB is a fair bank. I won't dramatize my experience and tell you to run as fast as you can. I won't exaggerate my satisfaction and tell you my experience was the absolute best. I plan to simply inform you of my experiences, how they made me feel, and what measures were taken to satisfy me as a customer.

Interest Rate & Cost: I gave this 3 stars simply because of my experiences with their fees. During my time with FSNB, I had the Career Checking account. So long as I had a direct deposit of at least $300/month, my account came with no service charge. I rarely used other ATMs, and so didn't have a problem with foreign ATM fees of $1.50. I rarely used Overdraft Protection, but when I did, it was only $19.75 per transaction, and I was not charged for every day my account was negative. I did, however, find some fees to be unnecessary. Withdrawal slips at teller stations are $1.25 unless certain conditions are met. This is really an attempt to encourage ATM use, so I understood. Until recently, paper statements were an obligatory privilege provided to me by the bank. Now I am charged $3.00 every month for paper statements. This fee could be waived if I sign up for e-Statements, which cancels paper statements, and this charge is an additional charge on top of any service charge I might incur. It seemed very unnecessary to me, as I've always understood statements to be something a bank was obliged to send me as a courtesy for banking with them. I have no experience with interest rates as far as loans go, simply because I chose not to go through FSNB for my auto loan. They wouldn't fund a truck for me, and if they did, they would set my payments at over $500/month, something that shocked me. I had to go through Fifth-Third Bank to finance my truck (whose interest rates are phenomenal). Interest rates on investments are next to nothing. I don't think you can get even a full 1% on any IRAs or CDs except a 60-month CD. Even then, it's 1.15% I believe. Not really worth the time if you're serious about drawing any kind of profit from investing.

Office Environment & Staff: I rated this 2 stars because of how FSNB had set up the method of interactions between me and their employees. FSNB employees at individual branches have very little power to do anything meaningful. At best, even the Branch Manager is a glorified teller. No branch employee can discuss loan information with me, they can't inform me about anything particular in regards to credit or debit cards, they're unable to help with internet banking, they're kept uninformed about overdraft protection and its policies, etc. There is very little the teller is able to do by themselves. In many instances, I have been required to call the Main Office located in Lawton, Oklahoma to fix any number of issues with my account. This normally wouldn't be a problem for me. In almost every dealing with the Main Office, however, I have experienced terse, rude CSRs who are generally as uninformed as branch personnel. The only difference between branch personnel and Call Center CSRs is that a branch employee will tell you they don't know the answer to that question, and they'll get you in contact with someone who does. With Call Center personnel, I was always given answers that seemed confident and correct, yet when cross-referenced with other employees, was incorrect, and usually put me in a tight spot or embarrassed me. I really didn't appreciate it, and I felt that remarking upon such an instance would be futile at best, as I didn't trust the Call Center staff to properly handle the situation to ensure it didn't happen again, to me or to another customer. Branch employees are a pleasure to interact with, however. It just seems they are so restricted as to what they can do. In a way, it's frustrating because I'm not even allowed to call the branch anymore to ask the most mundane of questions. Now I'm required to call the Main Bank for any and every question I might have, or I'll have to go to a branch to physically ask my question. I don't like dealing with the Main Bank. I feel they don't care for me as a customer, and to a degree, I understand that. To corporations, we're all numbers. It seems, however, that FSNB has ceased to even care about that.

Waiting Time: My wait time is never long when I go to a branch. Whenever I go to the bank, I can always find a teller who is available. My wait time when I call the Main Bank, however, depends on who I'm calling. Oftentimes, I call the Call Center for mundane things, and am connected fairly quickly. There are times, however, when I need to speak to another department because the Call Center is unable to handle my request. Depending on the department, the call time could be a few minutes or it could be close to an hour. The longest time I have ever waited on a call was over 45 minutes on hold to the Cards Department. I have had so many dealings with the Cards Department that I now understand the wait time for the Cards Department to be at least a 10 minute wait. That, to me, is unacceptable.

Other Services: FSNB has a fraud protection service that has proven itself to be a double-edged sword. Upon using my debit card, I begin setting a pattern I regularly follow. Anytime a transaction falls outside that pattern, a number of red flags is raised. If it's a sufficient enough suspicion, my card is suddenly frozen until I am contacted by the third-party company FSNB employs as one of the security agencies that monitor account activity. There were times I didn't receive a call, and when I did, the company was very vague in explaining themselves to me. The company is legitimate, I now know, but I was very suspicious in the beginning simply because I had no prior warning to any of this being possible; I just knew that my card was denying transactions despite having funds available. This service has saved me, however, from what may have been weeks of frustration. Somehow, whether by my own negligence or by some criminal activity, my card number was stolen while I was vacationing in Atlanta, Georgia. I still had my card with me when I returned to Tennessee, so I'm unsure how my card number was stolen, but a week after having returned to Tennessee, my card was shown as being used in Atlanta, Georgia at a business I have never heard of. Because I had informed FSNB of where I would be and when I would return, my previous transactions in Atlanta were not suspicious, but this transaction was, as FSNB was aware of my return to Tennessee. Knowing this, they contacted me and informed me of this. We were able to turn the card off before the transaction was accepted, and I was issued a new card that same day. I know that saved me from a lot of frustration. Aside from this, there were no services that really stood out to me.

FSNB was a good bank for me to begin banking with when I first started working, and it has been a good bank to learn the ways of the financial system. There's nothing impressive at FSNB, however. I wouldn't say it's a bad bank, but again, there's nothing terribly impressive that I wouldn't expect out of any financial institution, and in some instances, FSNB has failed to deliver on those expectations.

* this reviewer has be with this bank for 3 - 10 years
* this reviewer had 3 - 5 banks before.
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