If you have a Bank Central Asia (BCA) account, your days of checking your balance at the ATM for free are numbered, sort of.
BCA yesterday announced that they plan to introduce an administrative charge for people who check their balance at the ATM too often, because apparently it costs them a lot of money to operate and maintain ATMs.
“[Customers can] check their balance through M-Banking, SMS Banking, and Internet Banking for free. Maybe later if [customers check their balance at the ATM] 5 or 7 times, it’d still be free. We don’t want to prohibit people from checking their balance [at the ATM], but we want to prevent people from doing it unnecessarily,” said BCA First Director Jahja Setiaatmadja, as quoted by Detik yesterday.
Jahja explained that it costs BCA Rp 2,000 to Rp 3,000 every single time a customer checks their balance at the ATM, because obviously things like electricity and paper for the receipt don’t pay for themselves.
So the bank is going to introduce a limit on how many times a customer can check their balance at the ATM, which, according to Jahja, could be anywhere from 7 to 10 times per month. Any more than that, then the customer would be charged a nominal fee.
BCA is currently deciding how much to charge their customers for this new policy, which is expected to be enforced 3 to 6 months from now.
