What U.S. banks offer two-factor authentication (such as password & token) for online banking?
"StasM, It's taken a while but many banks offer tokens - although they tend to limit the accounts for which they will be issued. All of the following issue tokens, but there are many more: CitiBank JP Morgan Union Bank Wells Fargo Callaway Bank Wachovia Bank of North Dakota The River Bank of Wisconsin Metcalf Bank, Kansas Stonebridge Bank In 2005 federal regulators stipulated that banks needed to get better with security for online banking customers, but they did not endorse a particular technology. Tokens (aka fobs) were endorsed. The news was negatively received by the banks because putting more steps in the way of a customer drives the customer away. See this 2005 report for more info: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2005-11-02-cybercrime-prevention_x.htm  My guess is a tipping point was reached since then, where customers became savvy of the risks, and that the ""extra steps"" became less an issue than the ""extra security""." There are very few banks which offer two-factor authentication.  Part of the reason is cost.  Providing a token to every account-holder is expensive, not just in the device or system, but in providing support and assistance to the millions of people who won't have the faintest idea how it works and complain that they no longer have access to their accounts. That said, it is sometimes available on request for personal accounts and many banks require it for their business clients. My HSBC Business account comes with two-factor as default and it works extremely well. There is also the pseudo-two-factor security offered by Visa and MasterCard (3-D secure) which performs a similar function. E*Trade offers banking services, and will provide you with a security token free if you have sufficient assets there ($50,000). Otherwise they'll charge you a $25 fee. Bank of America supports two-factor authentication using SMS messages, similar to PayPal. You can enable the feature from Online Banking under Customer Service -> SafePass Settings. Update: Over the weekend of July 28th, 2012, the SafePass control on the authentication page was updated to simple HTML + JavaScript instead of Flash, so that it is now possible to login from Safari on iOS, among others. Some credit unions also offer them and support Business banking as well. First Tech Credit Union is a great example. They also have the most security-oriented banking website I've seen to date. https://www.firsttechfed.com/ As a side note I've found that Credit Unions are a MUCH better deal for personal and business banking. USAA does - that's my bank. Wells Fargo tries to determine whether the online activity is a risk; if it is, they'll require an SMS code or phoned code be entered. You can get a fairly definitive list of online companies at twofactorauth.org.
"You can shop for a mortgage rate without actually submitting a mortgage application.  Unfortunately, the U.S. Government has made it illegal for the banks to give you a ""good faith estimate"" of the mortgage cost and terms without submitting a mortgage application.  On the other hand, government regulations make the ""good faith estimates"" somewhat misleading.  (For one thing, they rarely are good for estimating how much money you will need to ""bring to the closing table"".) My understanding is that in the United States, multiple credit checks within a two-week period while shopping for a mortgage are combined to ding your credit rating only once. You need the following information to shop for a mortgage: A realistic ""appraisal value"".  Unless your market is going up quickly, a fair purchase price is usually close enough. Your expected loan amount (which you or a banker can estimate based on your down payment and likely closing costs). Your middle credit score, for purposes of mortgage applications.  (If you have a co-borrower, such as a spouse, many banks use the lower of the two persons' middle credit score). The annual property tax cost for the property, taking into account the new purchase price. The annual cost of homeowners' insurance. The annual cost of homeowners' association dues. Your minimum monthly payments on all debt.  Banks tend to round up the minimum payments.  Also, banks care whether any of that debt is secured by real estate. Your monthly income.  Banks usually include just the amount for which you can show that you are currently in the job, with regular paychecks and tax withholding, and that you have been in similar jobs (or training for such jobs) for the last two full years.  Banks usually subtract out any business losses that show up on tax returns.  There are special rules for alimony and child support payments. The loan terms you want, such as a 15-year fixed rate or 30-year fixed rate. The amount of points you are willing to pay.  Many banks are willing to lower your ""note rate"" by 0.125% if you pay 0.5% up-front.  The pros and cons of paying points is a good topic for another question. Whether you want a so-called ""no-fee"" or ""no-closing cost"" loan.  These loans cost less up-front, but have a higher ""note rate"". Unless you ask for a ""no-fee"" or ""no-closing cost"" loan, most banks have similar charges for things like: So the big differences are usually in: As discussed above, you can come up with a simple number for (roughly) comparing fixed-rate mortgage loan offers.  Take the loan origination (and similar) fees, and divide them by the loan amount.  Divide that percentage by 4.  Add that percentage to the ""note rate"" for a loan with ""no points"".  Use that last adjusted note rate to compare offers.  (This method works because you have the choice of using up-front savings to pay ""points"" to lower the ""note rate"".) Notice that once you have your middle credit score, you can ask other lenders to estimate the information above without actually submitting another loan application.  Because the mortgage market fluctuates, you should compare rates on the same morning of the same day.  You might want to check with three lenders, to see if your real estate agent's friend is competitive:" They want my online banking username and password. I don't know if it's a scam. It can't be any more obvious than that. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER give your online banking password to ANYONE. Not your lawyer, not your bank's local branch manager, not your best friend, not your wife, not your mother, and certainly not some random person on the street/Facebook/the Internet. If the money awarded is sufficient to cover the cost of supporting their software, then you can at the time of entering the contract make a pledge of the money.   However if you need to prove that you have sufficient funds otherwise, you need to ask the organizers what they need, typically a Bank Statement showing the funds may be sufficient in the easiest possible condition, on the other extreme you may need to open an escrow account and deposit the money as safe keeping with the Bank and then produce that letter ... Depending on the country and Bank, certain Banks allow different passowrds for transactions and different for querying, so you can share the query password ... OCTOBER 18, 2017 by John Gapper Goldman Sachs making too little money is not the worst of the world’s problems. But inside the investment bank’s New York headquarters, it feels like an insult.  Goldman is not suffering a financial crisis, as it did in 2008 when it officially converted to being a bank holding company amid panic that the whole of Wall Street could collapse. It faces something deeper: an identity crisis.  It used to be the role model for many rival banks — envied even while resented for its single-minded focus on investment banking and trading. But as Tuesday’s disclosure of a 26 per cent fall in its bond trading revenues confirmed, banking has changed. Instead of lenders such as JPMorgan Chase wanting to become as glamorous as Goldman, it needs to be more like them.  This is a telling moment, albeit less dramatic than 2008. Investment banking enjoyed a lucrative two decades, spurred by globalisation and financial liberalisation. Goldman’s revenues rose briskly from its initial public offering in 1999 to 2007, and boomed in 2009. It could do no wrong financially, although it turned out to have done wrong to some of its customers.  But guess what? Regulation works. Governments and central bank supervisors set out to make complex trading in bonds and derivatives, the securities business in which Goldman specialised, more expensive and less profitable. The rules now favour deposit taking and lending instead of wizardry.  No one really planned the second aspect of the bank’s difficulty. The huge dose of monetary easing since the crisis has damped volatility and made markets more predictable. Hedge funds, themselves under pressure, no longer need to reward Goldman and others for taking on financial risk.  Goldman’s bond and commodities trading division — from which emerged a cadre of leaders including Lloyd Blankfein, its chairman and chief executive — tells its own story. It used to occupy two floors of the New York office but has shrunk to one as Wall Street’s total bond trading revenues have halved since 2009. More prices are calculated by computers than humans.  When you rely heavily on one engine and that engine sputters, you are in trouble. The bank’s financial advisory and capital raising division is performing well and it has an investment management arm. But it lacks a consumer powerhouse like Morgan Stanley’s wealth management operation, or the lending and credit card activities that drive banks such as JPMorgan.  The humbling truth for Goldman is that US retail banking has become not only more reliable than investment banking, but more profitable. JPMorgan’s balance sheet is three times the size of Goldman’s and its retail banking arm made a 19 per cent return on equity in the third quarter, compared with Goldman’s 11 per cent.  The best historical comparison for Goldman’s predicament is, ironically, the JPMorgan of the 1990s. JPMorgan was a blue-chip corporate bank but found that this business was no longer profitable enough as lending margins fell. It launched an effort to return to investment banking, having been separated from Morgan Stanley in 1935 by the Glass-Steagall Act.  JPMorgan had a good stab at it, compensating for the fact that Goldman and others dominated Wall Street’s “bulge bracket” by pioneering credit derivatives (which later turned out badly). But it could not make enough progress alone and settled for being bought by Chase Manhattan in 2000.  “Both [banks] have struggled to keep pace with the rapid growth of the leading investment banks, which are in businesses that have been far more lucrative than the lending business at the core of commercial banking,” the New York Times noted in its account of the merger. Seventeen years and one financial crisis later, JPMorgan has reversed this order of profitability.  So Goldman is now trying to do the opposite of the old JPMorgan by adding banking to investment banking. JPMorgan’s former dilemma has not gone away — lending to blue-chip companies is not much of a moneymaker. A more tempting target is the high margins that banks make on credit cards.  Hence Marcus, Goldman’s online lender (named after its founder Marcus Goldman), which offers loans to prime US consumers as an alternative to credit card debt. Marcus, which will launch next year in the UK, accounts for $12bn of the $28bn in new lending and financing planned by Goldman in the next three years as it diversifies.  But it is no simpler for Goldman to break into Main Street than it was for the old JPMorgan to break back into Wall Street: $12bn on a balance sheet of $930bn is an interesting financial experiment, not a revolution. It would need to inflict on consumer banking with technology what Amazon did to the retail industry to rival fully JPMorgan and Bank of America.  “We’re a bank and we’re committed to being a bank,” says one partner firmly. But selling personal loans and mortgages, which could be Marcus’s next target, is not a job designed for masters of the universe. This is Goldman’s identity crisis: regulation and economics are rendering it ordinary. The answer to this question can be found in the related question  Is there any online personal finance software without online banking? Um  really, you expect US to know the answer?  Why not ask Wells Fargo? Unless someone here happens to work for WF and has access to the right people, this is more likely a question to send to their support people than to get an answer here that is anything other than a SWAG   (and in that line of reasoning, and as a software tester by trade, my money is on the already offered reasoning that it's doing some kind of primative 'bad word' search (probably a regular expression match) and getting a hit on tit.  ) In the meantime I suggest an alternative term, how about 'offering' CashBase has a web app, an iPhone app and an Android app, all sync'ed up. It doesn't integrate with banks automatically, but you can import bank statements as CSV. Disclaimer: I'm CashBase's founder. "In answering your question as it's written: I don't think you're really ""missing"" something. Different banks offer different rates. Online banks, or eBanking solutions, such as CapitalOne, Ally, Barclays, etc., typically offer higher interest rates on basic savings accounts.  There are differences between Money Market accounts and Standard Savings accounts, but primarily it comes down to how you can access your cash. This may vary based on bank, but Ally has a decent blurb about it: Regular savings accounts are easy to open and, when you choose an   online bank like Ally Bank, you tend to get interest rates that are   more competitive than brick-and-mortar counterparts, according to   Bankrate.com. Additionally, as a member of the FDIC, Ally Bank gives   you peace of mind knowing that the money in your Ally Bank Online   Savings Account is insured to the maximum allowed by the law.  Money market accounts are easy to open, too. And again, online banks may   offer better rates than traditional banks. Generally, you have a bit   more flexibility of access with a money market account than you do   with a savings account. You can access funds in your Ally Bank Money   Market Account through electronic fund transfers, checks, debit cards   and ATM withdrawals. With savings accounts, your access is limited to   electronic funds transfers or telephone withdrawals (and in-person   withdrawals at traditional banks). Both types of accounts are subject   to federal transaction limits. Here's a bit more information about a Money Market Account and why the rate might be a little bit higher (from thesimpledollar.com): A money market deposit account is a bit different. The restrictions on   what a bank can do with that money are somewhat looser – they can   often invest that money in things such as treasury notes, certificates   of deposit, municipal bonds, and so on in addition to the tight   restrictions of a normal savings accounts. In other words, the bank   can take your money and invest it in other investments that are very   safe. Now outside of your question, if you have $100K that you want to earn interest on, I'd suggest looking at options with higher rates of return rather than a basic savings account which will top out around 1% or so. What you do with that money is dependent on how quickly you need access to it, and there are a lot of Q&A's on this site that cover suggestions."