News

Bank fees are on the rise

April 18, 2005

Puget Sound (Seattle) Business Journal: Take a look at your next bank statement. All those little service charges are adding up for local banks. Puget Sound banks have seen their income from ATM fees, bounced-check fees, minimum-balance charges and other fees grow more than 54 percent since 2001, according to a Puget Sound Business Journal analysis of federal regulatory data and securities filings.

The increasing fee income reflects, in part, the healthy growth of deposits at locally based banks over the past several years. The Pacific Northwest saw 12 percent deposit growth in 2003 and the same percent again in 2004, according to D.A. Davidson & Co. brokerage.

At the same time, banks have increasingly come to view fee income from deposit accounts as an important revenue stream. And while the big banks like Washington Mutual Inc. tend to rely on such fee income more heavily than smaller community banks, the trend of rising fee income cuts across all size categories.

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