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Related to this — Wells Fargo was sued[1] (and lost) around 2010 for the practice of ordering daily transaction to (indirectly) maximize fees and penalties.

In your example, a “good” bank would order the transactions: +$50, -$25, -$25 resulting in a zero balance with no penalties. What Wells Fargo did could result in the transactions being ordered as: -$25 (overdraft), -$25 (overdraft), +$50.

Each overdraft could charge a fee up to $35, leaving the account holder with a -$70 balance.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-fi-court-bank-overdraft-fe...



Seems much simpler only to charge fees at the end of the day...


Unfortunately, the optimization goal for commercial entities generally is maximum money extraction, not simplicity :)




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