Charles Schwab Michigan Ave, Chicago

Not a bank. Better than a bank. Best prices for currency conversion. No fees at ATMs. Personable staff.

Free checking with unlimited ATM fee reimbursements gets around the bogus American standard of charging for ATMs (only my Other American banks have fees when I use international ATMs, an eye opener). Plus you get a brokerage account that is totally optional but encourages you to start investing when you're ready. I've had an account for at least 7 years and happy as ever. This is my primary account but I recommend having another checking for depositing cash when needed.

My husband went to this branch first thing in the morning to deposit a check into our checking account. Apparently, this brokerage branch is unable to deposit checks into our checking account, however the banker did not inform my husband of that fact. Instead, the banker deposited the money into our brokerage account (that we have never used prior to today), and when we realized this later, the bank said there was nothing they could do. In total, I spent over an hour on the phone today (while at work) trying to get this figured out because we knew that an auto-payment was going to come out of our checking account. The branch manager did not seem to care. Instead, they sent us a non-sufficient funds warning stating that we needed to deposit money into the account by the next day. This is what we tried doing in the first place! After calling Schwab customer support 4 separate times, I finally got ahold of a kind representative in Phoenix who had the money transferred to the correct account in a matter of minutes. We will NEVER use this branch again and will most likely be closing this account entirely. Terrible customer service from this branch manager and the Schwab customer support team in Denver!

I like these folks, especially after their merger w TD Ameritrade

Very friendly and helpful. Got everything done quickly and I felt very comfortable with the people working there.

Terrible customer service. Went there to transfer an account to them and was dealt with a bunch of incompetent people