Valley Direct:
Online Savings Account - 0.55% APY

I cannot believe that I opened an account online and read all fo the documentation and only then learned that I cannot get a single penny into the account without going to a branch. On the positive side, the account opening process was straightforward other than this.

An account that cannot be funded without going into a branch is not an online account and should not be listed as such.

opened account and then learned that i cannot transfer money in. waste of time and possibly hard credit pull.

I will start with the good things. First, the phone support was easy to reach and the representative really tried to be helpful. That's it for the good things. Now the bad things. First, the website looks like it was designed by a 2 year old and the user interface is worse than any online bank or brokerage I have ever seen. I was trying to set my account up to fund externally and I ended up making all of my external accounts visible to Valley which may or may not create a security issue. Second, it ended up being impossible to fund the account through external ACH transfers, even though the website says that is how you fund an account. The rep says it just isn't possible today and that renders the account much less useful to me (and, I imagine, to most others). Third, when I try to contact online support with a question, I get a message saying that they have responded but I cannot even find their response. A response that I cannot see turns this into a phone account and not an online account. Overall, I would say that the intention is clearly there to have an online bank, but the effort is half-baked so far.

Rejected for account on May 4. 2021.