Ally Bank Sign Up Review (Spoiler: It Sucked)
Posting this review here because I'm currently so locked out of my Ally bank account that I can't even post a review using the link that they sent to my email (AFTER they locked me out).
I've had the worst possible online banking experience with Ally Bank. The issue started from the initiation of creating a checking and savings account at the same time and trying to initiate a transfer for another bank account. Because the online initiation steps looped backwards multiple times due to trying to transfer from two separate bank accounts, which resulted in an initial call to customer service where they told me to submit again. Then the transactions went through six times, two of which coming from the wrong bank that I did not assign. And they failed to catch this detail while I was on my first customer service call with them. On the second call, less than 10 minutes later, Ally was unable to help me cancel any of these transfers. They advised I contact the bank that I was trying to initiate the transfer from, whom attempted to put a block in the place, but it was too late as the next day my account was overdrawn by more than a grand. It took two full business days before my original bank corrected the overdraw. Then it took two more business days after that for the transactions to correct on Ally bank. Meaning that for some reason it gave me an available balance of over a grand which didn't exist. Again when I called I was told I have to wait a few more business days. When I finally thought maybe that everything had been figured out, the bank accounts zeroed out, I was then considering reattempting a transfer from my original bank vs canceling my accounts, my account was my flagged for FRAUD. I attempted to log back into my account to see what the issue was and I was LOCKED OUT. The wait time for the fraud line was over 50 minutes. After relaying the story again to the fraud protection line, they informed me that they would give this information to the assigned investigator, but there was no estimated time that it would take to unlock my account. At this time, I'm still unable to log into anything. Which means if I actually had funds in my account, I would have no idea when I would be able to access them.
I'll say everyone on the customer service lines were obviously tried their best to be helpful, but it was extremely frustrating that their hands were tied in terms of helping me set up and access my account.
So, the short answer is I would not recommend Ally bank to my friends, but maybe to my worst enemy.