Over the weekend, I tried to wire funds from my TD bank account another TD account, yesterday I learned it had bounced back.
At the time I sent the wire, I noted to the teller it was going to another TD account, she didn’t seem to have any concerns. This morning, I went to the branch at Brookfield Place to ask the branch manager to investigate.
While it’s nice that I get to save on the wire transfer fees, this seems like a broken abstraction. There’s no reason why TD’s wire department couldn’t detect this case and just do the inter-bank account-to-account transfer. To them, this should just be an internal accounting issue. Another thing that I learned through this process was that this limitation was a little known at TD across multiple branches.
Educating tellers and staff is not high leverage, humans forget easily edge cases they don’t encounter often. Their systems should either have abstracted this limitation or informed the staff that this should be done via an account-to-account transfer. Catching exceptions early or making them transparent to the end-client leads to better end user-experiences.