"A cap of $10 was chosen to balance the need to protect consumers from high fees with the need to maintain the integrity of the payments system by incentivizing consumers to honour their payments," the department wrote.
Don't worry, they usually do, they just give you privilege of paying anyways.
Having worked in banking I can tell you it's a fee that is charged purely to punish people with limited cashflow. EQ bank is the only one I know of that doesn't have them.
This is huge. It seems criminal for banks to charge you up to $50 when you may not even have that in your account.
34% of Canadians getting slapped with one of these fees in 2023 is bonkers. That's like $50 million in fees taken from the people who are least able to afford it.
I'm reminded of a radio interview with, I believe, an RBC rep a couple decades ago. They were asked about their various fees and why they kept them as they were so unpopular with their customers. The response was along the lines of, "Well, it's only a small part of our revenue." I was sort of thinking, "What, so you can't think of a reason, either?!"
It’s 100% automatic and electronically based. The marginal cost of processing any NSF is quite literally $0. Even at $10, it’s 100% profit to the banks.
Unsure if it has changed but in 2018 I was approving and declining transactions manually before 9:30AM that would go through accounts with insufficient funds. Any transaction I didn't have time to go through before the 9:30 cut off would auto NSF
But if you were to have written the headline, and could only eat either a hamburger or a hot dog today, how many shoes would you own if next Tuesday was a full moon?