North Shore Bank

The bank manager, Farrah Mason, helped me obtain two credit cards from North Shore. She was very helpful, knowledgeable, and friendly.

These folks like to call themselves the only full-service bank in Sturgeon Bay. The problem is that they do not have enough staff to handle basic requests. Do you want to open an account and deposit thousands of dollars? To do so, you must have an appointment with a banker, and that takes 1 to 2 days to set up. I appreciate courteous, professional employees who like to say "Yes" when you're in their bank branch asking for service, instead of, "No, not today. Can you come back tomorrow afternoon?" Need to transfer money in an emergency? North Shore Bank is not the bank you to use.

I used their website to make additional payments to my loan with the understanding from Lisa in customer service that 100% of those payments would be applied to the principal. When I received my monthly statement, they had only applied part of my payment to the principal and part to interest. When I called customer service, I was told the only way to ensure all of my additional payment was applied to the principal was to mail a check with a note stating where I wanted the payment applied. In today's high-tech world, adding a simple box as to where you want your payment applied is not a difficult thing to do.

Out of the blue today, I received some random facts that looked like spam or a scam. I nearly deleted it and reported it as junk. I thought perhaps I should alert someone at North Shore, only to find out that without my knowledge or permission, my current debit card that I have tied to everything has been canceled due to a breach of some kind of security on North Shore's part. I would be receiving a snail mail letter to explain the situation further. Two hours and two phone calls later, and I know nothing except apparently North Shore Bank has no customer service. This is going to be incredibly time-consuming and annoying, and I have no idea what's going on. So now, do I switch to one of my other banks that I use as a backup because my main bank has failed me so spectacularly, so I don't have to go through this again since I have no idea what's going on. I don't know if it's just three of us that were breached or every single customer that North Shore has—and no one cares. I would think after two hours if there was actually management involved and true customer service, I would know a lot more about how to make an appropriate decision.

Oftentimes, as with any business, a bad experience can result from an incident with just one person, not the business as a whole. However, their attitude or competence reflects on the entire organization. This is clearly the case here, where the branch manager at the Oklahoma Ave. location in West Allis exhibits very poor interpersonal and communication skills and a condescending attitude.

MUST READ!!! IMPORTANT to anyone seriously considering getting a loan from these, incompetent, self-righteous, ethically challenged "bankers."

I'm writing this after 2 months of dealing with Miguel Pesqueira (VP Community Lending-Sales Manager (West Allis, WI)) and his team. NMLS Number: 411910

Rarely do I waste my time writing reviews, however, after 22 years of being in business performing various real estate involved services, North Shore Bank sure deserves one here.

In summary, two very close Hispanic friends of mine (Husband/Wife/2 Small children), both with good paying jobs, were strung along like sheep for nearly 60 days trying to get answers on the potential purchase of their FIRST home. As a licensed WI broker and friend, I offered to help them through the paperwork and acted as a so-called free intermediary between the bank and the buyers, as we all know how banking terms can be unreadable and confusing. This being their first home, we were unsure of how the underwriting process would go for them or what type of loan programs they would qualify for given that both buyers were independent contractors, with a long history of consistent pay and raises.

Well, after roughly 40 days of dealing with Miguel losing the buyer's information, forgetting he met with them more than once in his office, and completely ignoring their phone calls, emails, texts, and voicemails, we received word that everything was on track to close the first week of November and Miguel asked if North Shore could use the same closing/title company that the buyers elected to use - Knight Barry. Very simply, we connected North Shore and Knight Barry Title via email and locked in a closing date.

Quick details: The appraisal came back at $70k over the offer to purchase the accepted price, great news, right!? The buyers had the required 10-20% down payment and the payment calculated by North Shore was doable for the buyers. All had agreed to move forward and locked in the interest rate of 7.4%.... At this point the buyers had met, IN PERSON, with Miguel at least 3 times, dropping off different paperwork that Miguel had "lost" even though proof of emails sent to him existed. In addition, I (acting as a broker friend) tried reaching out to Miguel and his team at least 20 times, more when you include texts back and forth. I got ahold of Miguel maybe 4 times and each time he had promised me everything was good to go, and no additional info was required from the buyers. On two of those calls he had completely forgotten who the buyers were or that they were in his office the day before dropping off things he had clearly lost. Moving on.....

Finally, A closing statement was drafted and emailed out to all parties from Knight Barry. We were set to close in a week, or so we thought.

A day or two before the FIRST closing, we hadn't heard from Miguel on what time he would be attending closing, so I tried reaching him. Finally, he got back to me and said that the loan program he wanted for the buyers was no longer available to them and he would be moving them from a 30-year fixed to a 5-year ARM and asked if we could close 2 weeks later after the buyers return from vacation.

Remember, this is a couple days BEFORE closing!!! People have already taken off work to attend the closing and there are 2 SMALL CHILDREN involved here that still didn't know about the new house. The buyers were planning a huge surprise fiesta for the next weekend since WE WERE ALL TOLD MANY TIMES THAT THE LOAN WAS 100% CLOSING.

2 weeks go by, buyers return home and are told multiple times the loan is 100% and would close in 3 days.

2 days before closing, Miguel is unreachable to everyone.

1 day before closing at 5 pm, Miguel calls the wife/buyer and in a 2-minute chat tells her they've been DENIED and hangs up. He NEVER called me, Knight Barry, or the husband. Now the family is devastated and has no Christmas surprise for their young daughters.

All of this noise over something a bank like Associated Bank could have closed in under 45 days.

Stay Away from NORTH SHORE BANK. TRUST ME.

Recently I've been having issues paying my credit bill to Elan Services every payment was misapplied and at one point Elan demanded my checking and saving info. And won't accept a payment with debit card. I would like to Give a Kudos to Erica the branch manager at Germantown who found a work around to resolve the bill pay issue caused by Elan. I won't recommend using this card to save yourself a lot of agony .

The pleasant street bank has new people and in the past always felt good about my money.
Prior years ago they had adversial people; yet when I voiced this to them instead of s. Media everything changed.

Literally an untrustworthy bank. Do not put any of your cash in this bank. In less than 6 months my account has been compromised with zero notification of potential fraud charges. This means this bank offers no protection for your money. And even after you notify them of a fraud charges, they do nothing. Now I have not only thousands of dollars in bounced checks but this bank had the audacity of surcharging me for each bounced check even though i filled out a fraud charge claim. Closing out all my personal accounts and my business account. I highly recommend people do the same if they value their money because this bank certainly doesn't

Run from this bank! They are very adversarial to their customers, and their fees are significantly more than other banks. As a POA for my dads estate they were rude, cruel, uncooperative and sarcastic when I was trying to close accounts after his death. These attitudes have been my experience every time I have dealt with them over the last 5 years dealing with both my parents accounts as their POA. NEVER Would I consider using this bank for my finances given my experiences!! The only reason I stayed with them at all was that it was easier, given my folks had established accounts, and limited activity on their accounts. Consistently if I did need to
Call or ask questions I got inaccurate or conflicting responses.

Have been coming across one problem after another. I never had to call customer services so many times to get things resolved. So frustrating.

WARNING!! Do not use this bank!! They arbitrarily charge bogus fees!! I just realized they were charging me a $6 fee every month. To have this fee waived I would have had to fulfill one out of three obligations. I had been fulfilling not one, but two obligations every month for 30 months. They charged me this fee TWENTY SEVEN times. When I let them know, they stated they would only reimburse 2 fees, even knowing that I was going to move my business elsewhere.
*I have been with this bank for 25 years!!*

NEVER AGAIN!

I was co-owner on my mother's account. She died last June. I kept her account open to review a direct deposit on her final tax return. I filed a change of address at the post office to have her mail sent to my house. Then last December North Shore started assessing "Non deliverable mail" fees of $10 every time they sent something. Eventually the balance in checking went negative, and they started applying a $5 daily negative balance charge. I went in to the bank to close the account and try and get some of the charges reversed. I got the "rules and rules" speech, I should have come into the bank to change the address, show them a death certificate, etc.

I started banking with North Shore when I was 16 and over that four year period, i kept running into problems that the customer service reps seemed either unable or unwilling to solve. I hate that In the better than free package, I'm paying fees for services I haven't used. They apparently don't keep tabs on what accounts are opened and closed, so when i received a new debit card from them, it was from a checking account i had closed two years previous. It was a huge mess with customer service as i explained to them that i cut up my old card, thinking that they sent me the card for my open account, not my closed one! The bank is also not in a convenient location for me, but the bigger issue in my mind is the bad customer service! Go to another bank, I have!