WELLS FARGO STOPS ACCEPTING CASH DEPOSITS FOR BIZ ACCOUNTS

April 19, 2018

This month, business owners were informed by Wells Fargo that customers and employees could no longer make cash deposits into business accounts. Only the business owner can deposit cash into their own account.

What does this means for your businesses?

Tenants can no longer deposit cash into a Landlords account.

If you own a business like a restaurant or a chain of restaurants or any business with multiple locations where employees usually make daily cash deposits into a Wells Fargo business account that is no longer allowed. The owner must now make the deposits him or herself.

Many business-owners send their assistants to the bank to deposit money, that’s now forbidden.

Wells Fargo managers we spoke with said the change was required to comply with a new federal law.

But other banks like Nevada State Bank still accept cash deposits from someone other than an account holder.

Banks like Wells Fargo are not alone, they join Chase and Bank of America in this new cashless policy. In recent years, Wells Fargo started charging fees for cash deposits made in business accounts.

The banks now only accept checks and/or money orders for deposits from people other than the business owner. So the business owner can still deposit cash but that’s it, unless the owner puts someone on the account as a signer. It very unlikely a business owner wants to hand over the keys to their business account to a stranger.

This has serious implications for business owners who usually see instant credit for cash deposits and now must wait sometimes up to 10 days for a check to clear. Wells Fargo claimed the policy change is an effort to stamp out money laundering.

But the fact is that the U.S. government filed less than 2,500 money laundering charges for all of 2017. That’s out of a population of 320 million Americans.