Cross County Federal Savings Bank

I have been a customer since my children were little. That would be more then 20 years. This is a very good bank. The people there are very friendly and helpful. I go to the one in Middle Village. During this time I have only had 1 incident and they were very helpful. They looked into the matter right away and kept me informed as to what was being done. Besides it taking a few days to get my money back that was taken out of my account, they were very helpful. I always felt comfortable and continue to be well taken care of when banking with Cross County Federal Savings Bank. I would recommend it to other people.
Karla

Several things have happened in the couple of years I’ve been a customer that have been fairly annoying (and have caused me to downgrade from four stars to two), and they all have to do with the extraordinary security measures this bank takes. I’m thankful for a bank that wants to protect its customers from fraud, but I would argue Cross County is overzealous about security, and customers are required to carry out antiquated tasks in order to do fairly basic things. For example, whenever I want to buy anything from a non-​US website, I have to clear it with the bank first. I get needing to tip them off when I’ll be using my debit card overseas on my travels, but to make a website purchase? That’s a bit much, especially since I’d only be buying something that costs maybe $ 50. Another example: I needed to make a large purchase with my debit card, and while it’s normal for all banks to require that you contact them to clear a purchase exceeding $ 5,000, trying to get Cross County to do that for me was tragicomic. I had to keep calling my local branch, and they would have to contact some guy whom I kept being told wasn’t at his desk yet — «he should be there soon!» — and then I’d be on the phone with the company from which I was trying to make the purchase, and they kept running my card only to have it declined even though I was assured by Cross County that the mysterious guy was at his desk and was aware of my request to clear over $ 5K. I’d call the branch back and they’d say that everything looked like I was ready to go with the purchase, but if it still wasn’t working, they were really sorry. End of story. I had to have my husband use his Citibank card to make the purchase, which went through immediately without any problems. My final example: I moved to a new address in Brooklyn, no longer in Williamsburg, and so I wanted to update my mailing info. I couldn’t do it online, because that would be too convenient and too 21^st century, so I called the Williamsburg branch with the idea that surely I could update my info over the phone, but was told they would have to mail me a form, and after I filled it out with my current info, I’d have to mail it back to them, and then they would update it in their system. I’m surprised they didn’t send around a horse-​drawn cart or a carrier pigeon. So these things don’t signal the end of the world and they’re technically inconveniences, but it’s not as if we’re talking about Cross County needing to put in place expensive technological updates to the way they do banking. They just need to stop doing business at a snail’s pace and implement some modern-​day improvements that don’t require a chain of phone calls and fax machines. If they deem their online banking site safe enough for customers to check their accounts, pay bills, and transfer money, then they should allow customers to do almost all of the things I described above through that website.

The worst. THE WORST. I have been banking with them since 2006 because I wanted to support a small local bank. I will soon be closing my account. With the exception of a couple of nice tellers, the employees here are rude, slow, and treat you like crap. But worst of all is their poor accounting. One month my rent check bounced despite the fact that I had made a cash envelope deposit the same day. They reversed the «bounce «the next day, but I didn’t want my landlord to have to wait for the reversal to happen in HIS account so I put a stop payment on the check and gave him cash. The next month rolls around, I check my balance online, and they have stopped THAT MONTH’s rent check even though my stop payment form specified a ONE TIME payment. I call and the manager says «oh yeah, that must have been what happened — they didn’t read the form right.» No apology, no nothing, just admitting that their staff doesn’t regularly check forms. I asked her to please investigate and make sure this didn’t happen again and to call me back — nothing. I now — I shit you not — cannot write a check for the AMOUNT OF MY RENT. I have to make any cash or check deposits in person to make sure they get correctly credited, which involves often waiting 20 minutes in the morning or more even with three tellers there who take about 45 minutes to give a local store owner rolls of quarters. The online banking system doesn’t show withdrawls in real time even for automatic payments, so it’s often impossible to determine when payments clear. did I mention everyone is rude? Once I made a different cash deposit via envelope in the ATM and it wasn’t counted until much later than it was supposed to – when I called the woman said «WELL YOU BOUGHT A HUNDRED DOLLAR METROCARD» and I had to say «no, I made a DEPOSIT at the METROPOLITAN AVENUE OFFICE of your BANK, in which you are sitting RIGHT NOW SNAPPING YOUR GUM AT ME ON THE PHONE.» Unless you are an elderly Italian individual who has lived in the neighborhood for 99 years, I recommend you keep your money in a sock in your freezer because you will have a better experience than at this «bank» (whom I am reporting to the state commission.)