At 11:34 AM on Wednesday, my savings bank Marcus1 sent me an email with the subject line “We updated our Deposit Account Agreement”. It indicated that a small change was being made to an agreement I promise you no one has ever read in the first place:
We’d like to highlight the following, which will go into effect on 6/28/24:
• Wire transfers (page 8): We clarify our wire transfers policy and explain that wire transfers may be sent or received to/from external banks located in the US, specified US territories or US jurisdictions only. (We still don’t charge any fees to send or receive wire transfers.)
“There’s no action required from you”, the email assured me. And yet, that proved to be false. Over the next 47 hours, they sent 11 more emails:
Each email was identical to the first, and each one needed to be deleted by me. One extremely needless (though probably legally mandated) email is plenty. One every few hours, for multiple days, is ridiculous. Marcus really seemed to be going through it.
The emails finally dried up on Friday, and I figured that was the end of it. Almost, but not quite. On Monday, after they’d had a chance to cool down, Marcus emailed me one more time:
There’s some incongruity to sending yet another email to apologize for sending duplicate emails in error. Still, I suppose it could’ve been worse. It could’ve been a phone call.
Footnotes:
It’s more complicated than that, really. From their site: “Marcus by Goldman Sachs® is a brand of Goldman Sachs Bank USA and Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC (“GS&Co.”), which are subsidiaries of The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.” For simplicity, I’m just calling Marcus my bank. ↩︎
