Banking In Texas

Texas has well set banking regulations regarding fees, personal information, identity theft, bank accounts, loans, home equity loans and other miscellaneous issues. A bank in Texas is entitled to charge non-customers some check cashing fees. This practice was legally endorsed in 2001. In Texas, banking polices are consumer friendly. There’s no set limit for the fee banks can charge to process non-sufficient items, however. But banks are legally bound to disclose the charge.

According to the Texas Department of Banking, there are set rules regarding the pieces of info that banks can request when someone wants to cash a check. As required by the Texas Business and Commerce Code, it is mandatory for Texas based banks to verify all checks that are presented to them. However, there’s no set regulation in particular that specifies the procedures to be used. Banks get to decide what policies they will follow for verifying checks and for requesting identifying info before checks are cashed. There are some Texan financial institutions out there who regularly participate in some kind of "thumb-printing" programs that require non-account holders to apply thumbprints, which are put in clear ink just next to the endorsement while cashing checks in Texan banks where there’s no account they hold. As per the law, banks are not bound to cash a check for a non-account holder. Believe it or not, some Texan institutions will actually refuse to cash this type of checks to limit their check fraud losses.

There is also no law to limit the amount banks charge on ATM transactions. It entirely depends on the policy of the bank. When fees are charged the bank has to fully specify these charges as the card is received. An amendment of Regulation E (i.e. the Electronic Fund Transfers Act) was made by the Federal Reserve for imposing provisions of an act called GLBA. This requires that ATM fees are disclosed. The ATM operator imposing the fees on the customer for any electronic fund transfer or EFT service will essentially have to give notice of the ATM the EFT was initiated with. Moreover, ATM operators are also obliged to disclose the issue that a certain amount of fee would be imposed in addition to the fee. This notice can appear on the ATM screen or as a normal paper notice. But this notice has to be delivered to consumer before she or he completes the transaction. In other words, the ATM operator cannot impose any fee unless and until proper notice has been provided to the consumers, so they get to decide whether they’ll complete the ATM transaction or not. As you use your ATM card to buy something, the retailer can add up a fee to the purchase total. But here again, the store must disclose this charge, so the customer gets to see this at the checkout counter. Remember that non sufficient funds or NSF fees are not regarded as interest and they are in no way subject to usury. They’re fees regarding the "NSF" check processing.

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