SchoolsFirst Federal Credit Union Checking Accounts

Although the people at SchoolsFirst are very professional and courteous, the systems the credit union has in place to protect member identity are nothing short of irresponsible. I am a member, but my wife is not. SchoolsFirst allowed someone to go online and open a bank account in my wife's name with only her name, address, and SSN. They had the birthday, email, phone number, mother's maiden name, place of employment, and salary completely wrong. The perpetrator did not submit a driver's license for ID—just a fake passport number with no picture. The bank representative admitted they did not do anything to check if the passport was valid. (My wife does not have a valid passport.)
Within a week, they had allowed this person to take $35,000 in loans on my wife's credit, still with no photo ID, no phone call to verify employment, no IRS tax check to see if her employment was valid. On the application, it listed her salary as a high school teacher at over $200,000!
On the phone, the bank representative insisted to us repeatedly that all the information given to open the account and loans met their very strict standards for establishing identity. I simply cannot believe a financial institution could be so careless. From my research, it seems to me that they actually violated federal law in multiple ways.
Again, the people we spoke with have been very courteous and have helped get this off my wife's credit report. But, the bank has not admitted any responsibility for their abject failure to exercise due diligence and has done nothing to compensate my wife for the many hours of trouble and stress this has caused.

Stay away from schools first. They have the WORST website that makes you waste so much time to make payments from external accounts. I originally opened my account with a different credit union that was later bought out by Schools First. I inquired right off the bat about being able to pay directly from an external account and was told that wasn't possible and I had to first transfer the money from my external account to my schools first checking and then pay my personal loan from there. The problem is, the zelle transfer would take at least 3 days. A few months in, I always had to transfer money from external account, pay my bank for the transfer, wait 3-5 days for the zelle transfer to go through, then log back in and pay from my checking account. For someone like me who has many responsibilities and who likes to pay all my bills at the same time on one single sit-down this was not gonna work. I continue doing this until a few months later I inquired again about being able to add an external account to make payments directly and they said they didnt have that option (even though they did have it by then). I wasted at least half an hour on that call. The next month i called again, wasting another half hour, they said they did have it but it would take a few days to be set up. I said ok because I month past due and I needed to set that up to not waste more time in the future. I went through the process only to find out once set up, the website wouldn't let make payments for the past due amount only but it required the entire amount even though the next month's payment wasn't due yet. When I finally made my payment full 4 days before the grace period for reflecting late payments to credit bureaus they still reported it late. They were absolutely helpless except for the one person who did help me set up the account when everybody else had said it wasnt posible. I had had a perfect payment history on my credit report and because of their stupid website and their unhelpful team my credit score went down by 50 points even though i made constant efforts to reach out and get the situation taken care of.

I am one of the members since 22 years ago and have accounts in 2 other banks. This is the best bank ever. Their rates are great, from Credit cards to home loan. We are so happy we SchoolsFirst FCU. I recommend this bank to everyone.

I have been with OCTFU/SchoolsFirst for 48 years. I have always enjoyed the first rate service in a timely manner. After the merger many of the features that made banking with SchoolsFirst a care free experience were changed. The staff are still top notch but waiting to speak with someone has become tedious, even before covid. The two star rating though is specifically for the frustrating and poorly designed website. Some of the most irritating "features" are 1) Having to log on with the same device each time to avoid a security check. If you use a different device than last used you will have to get a code to log on, each time you switch between the two devices. 2) The security codes are eight digits long so have a pencil and paper handy. 3) Account balances are updated before entries are show up as being posted so the info is like Forest Gump's "box of chocolates"
4) The website design is spartan and is not intuitive like its predecessor . At least the "How to" feature is helpful 5) Using "Zelle" can only be done on the mobile site whose design is even worse. Most likely there are others who can add to this partial list but the real question is why have these shortcomings persisted?

We have been with Schools since the 80's in our family. The recent merger to become Schools First has been and is a definite downer for the customer. The lines are longer, the phone wait time is longer and worst of all, the platform they use for their website will not even let you on sometimes for over 10 minutes. I cannot do any online banking with a company that does not keep up with the modern technology to make it possible. If this does not change, we will be moving all our accounts. We feel the merger was more to do with helping them make more money that it was helping the customer!

They decided, in all their wisdom, to transition Schools financial memberships on Sunday, a day they don't have phone support. And I can't register for online banking because I don't have a member number. Evidently the account number on the checks they sent is not it.

Neither my spouse nor I can find the "transition packages" that are supposed to have all the info we need to transition. We got our checks, ATM, and credit cards, but no package with member numbers or anything (we just spent an hour sifting through two weeks worth of recycled paper just to be sure these weren't tossed by accident). I finally got the phone number to work for my ATM card activation (took a few tries and the process had a long delay). At least it said it worked, but that was only after disconnecting me the first time I tried. The other ways of activating the card didn't work, because no one is answering their phone today (Nov 1), and without a member number I cannot set up online banking to allow me to log in to their website to activate.

I don't really feel comfortable having my money with a company that engineered such a slipshod transition process. It should have been utterly seamless from our end, or at the very least, we should have been able to log in to their site with our old account information and then pick a new user name and password. I am probably going to be switching to a new credit union, assuming I can ever access my account information and money to transition over. Something tells me their phone help will have really long wait times tomorrow :(

Day 1 of the merger between Schools Financial & Schools First. Communication from First tells us to activate our debit cards on 1 Nov. It gives four options to do so 1. Use your card at an ATM - My card was denied as "No Card Record". Yet, my old Schools debit card is "Do Not Honor". 2. Visit SchoolsFirst web site. That site is down. 3. Use Mobile Banking app - unable to set it up as the log in and account numbers have changed. 4. Call 800-299-9677 - calling that gets a recorded message that they are not open and then it automatically hangs up on you. I google any related issues and find on twitter that their system will be down till 9 am PST. It is now 10:00 am and still is down. I also went into the CU last week to add my wife to my account - was told the transaction could not be done till after 1 Nov. I tried to update a BillPay account a couple days ago and it would not allow me to do so. I went to the old Schools web site and am unable to access my accounts, bill pay, etc. It even tells us to click below to register your new cards and all clicking does is send you to their tutorial. They have had months in which to figure this out and be prepared, yet Day 1 no one has access to their accounts or money. Something really big will be required to stop me from being in line on 2 Nov to close my accounts. There are other CUs that don't do business this way and

Schools became Schools Financial 11/1. Cards don't work, app/website/800 are down, NO ACCESS to money because it is SUNDAY. I am ready to switch to another credit union

Shahzad M spoke on the phone with me today and I had questions and he had all the answers. I had to reset all my information from my account I was overwhelmed with my anxiety even before he answered but he was so patient and calm with me that I felt better and calmed down. He did a great job really made my day to speak to someone who actually wanted to help and not feel like a burden with all my questions. He was so sweet and would tell me “it’s ok no rush take ur time im here to help”. At the end I got all the help I needed everything was fixed now I have a new card coming in with a new design and all my account info is fixed.
Thank you Shahzad