How to Open a Tangerine Chequing Account If You Don’t Have Any Bank Accounts Anywhere

Posted on 2016 06 28 by BetCrooks

Recently, a young relative was interested in opening his first bank account. He was 16 and knew that if he got a job for the summer with the city they required a bank account for making direct deposit payroll payments. He decided to start with a Tangerine chequing account, for a variety of reasons. Here’s what he had to do to open the account and get his id verified since he did not have another chequing or bank account from which to mail in a cheque.

Before You Apply to Open Your Tangerine Chequing Account

There are a few things to consider before you start typing in your info online.

If you want to use a promotional code, get it first. For example, sometimes Tangerine offers a cash reward for opening your first account ever, or offers a bonus interest rate. Figure out which one will make you the most money and get that code handy.
You will have to give them a PIN number for your online and telephone banking. This is a 6 digit number. You’ll probably want to pick a good one (not your phone number or your birth date!) before you start the application so you don’t have to come up with something secure quickly.
You’ll need your Social Insurance Number.
If you have a printer, it will be easier to do the final step of visiting a Canada Post outlet to verify your id and complete your application. (There is a scannable bar code the post office uses to start the procedure.) You don’t need a printer, though, if you don’t have one.

Is It Better to Get 2.4% Interest for 6 Months or $50 in Cash for Opening My First Tangerine Account Ever?

Right now, in June 2016, Tangerine is offering a promotional interest rate for the first 6 months of 2.4% for money in a Tangerine Savings Account. They are also offering a $50 bonus if you sign up using another person’s Orange Key, even if you only deposit $100.

At first, it seems like the higher interest is the best deal. But is it?

If you deposit and keep a $1000 balance in your Savings account for 6 months, you would earn about $12 in interest. You’d actually earn a bit more because interest is paid monthly, and after it’s paid, you’ll earn interest on your interest.

In addition, the June promotion offers a cash $25 bonus if you deposit at least $100. So in total you’d make a bit more than $37 over the 6 months. But that’s less than the $50 you could get immediately by using a “friends and family” Orange Key. And you’d also make 0.8% interest for the 6 months, or about another $8 for a total of $58.

So if you plan to keep $2000 or more in your Tangerine Savings account each day for the full six months, and put all of that money in on the day you open the account, then it may make you more money to sign up using the 2.4% rate Orange Key. If not, you may want to use an Orange Key that earns you $50 immediately.

What Do I Do To Open My First Tangerine Account?

UPDATE: These instructions have been updated as far as possible on October 2 2017 because Tangerine has rolled-out a new website design. I can only go so far, though, because I am not eligible to open a new account.

Go to the Tangerine website.

~~Click on the Sign Me Up tab.~~

There are four big buttons labeled

Spending
Saving
Investing
Borrowing
~~Business~~

which are the types of accounts you can open.

To open a chequing account, click on the Spending button.

The Tangerine Spending Page

For the Tangerine Chequing Account, click on the Chequing Account link or button and read through the details. If you still want to go ahead, near the bottom of the info, click on the button Enroll Now.

The Are you already a Client Popup Window

Tangerine will ask if you are already a client.
Click on the button: No, sign me up.

Enrolling for a Tangerine No Fee Chequing Account

You will need

Your complete mailing address, phone number and email address
Your social insurance number, SIN
Your Orange Key number so you can get your bonus cash and/or higher interest rate
Your occupation (which can be unemployed, retired, student or homemaker etc. You don’t have to have a paying job.)
An email address
A 6-digit PIN you can use for your online and phone banking

The Great! Let’s get started Page

Type the appropriate info in the following text boxes:

Email
Email, again
Create a PIN for online and phone banking:
PIN, again
Enter Orange Key*

Then click on the Next button.

The Basic Info Page

From the drop-down list, select your Title, for example, Mrs.

Type to fill in the text boxes for

First name
Last name
Postal Code
Street Number
Street Address
Suite/Unit/Apt (optional)
City
Province
Home telephone number
Mobile telephone number (optional)
Business telephone number (optional)

Click to select whether your Home or Mobile telephone number should be the primary number at which to call you.

From the drop-down list select your Employment status. For example:

Employed
Self-employed
Retired
Student
Homemaker
Not working (Unemployed or Disability)

If you choose employed or self-employed, it will prompt you further.

From the drop-down list, select your Industry.

From the drop-down list, select your Occupation.

Ironically, although I selected Self-employed, it is demanding I type in a name in the Employer Name box!

Click on the Next button.

The A few more details Page

Type the appropriate info in the following text boxes:

Date of Birth
Social Insurance Number

To proceed, you will also have to check the following boxes.

Before you do so, think about whether these things are acceptable to you:

Agreeing to the Tangerine Account Terms and Privacy Code AND agreeing to a credit bureau check. NOTE: this will have an impact on your credit rating.
Optionally agreeing to receive documents electronically.
Agreeing to the Tangerine Web Terms and Conditions.

Click on the Next button.

October 1 2017 UPDATE: That’s as far as I can go with a mock account setup. So I don’t know exactly what happened with the following screens that used to be next when signing up:

The Legal Stuff Screen

Choose the intended use of your bank account from the drop-down list:

Daily banking
Home Purchase
Retirement
Personal Savings
Purchase a Vehicle
Vacation/Leisure
Education
Emergency Fund
Other

Answer the question Yes or No, Will this account be used on behalf of a third party other than the named Account Holder?

Your Account Confirmation

You will receive a Tangerine number. Make a note of it in case you need to call in to Tangerine and for future use when banking.

The Activate Your Tangerine Chequing Account Screen

Next, three choices are offered for how to authenticate your id and to provide a sample signature for cheques.

If you don’t have a bank account at another bank, you will need to choose either to visit a Tangerine Bank location or to visit a Canada Post Outlet.

There is no Tangerine Bank near here, so my relative made the Canada Post outlet choice.

When selected, instructions will be displayed about how to take your proof of id to a Canada Post outlet. There is a Canada Post DSS Barcode that the post office employee will scan to start the procedure.

Print the document to take with you to the Post Office. (Or write down the Canada Post DSS Barcode. They can manually type it in at the Post Office if necessary.)

Before heading for your local post office outlet, collect the required id to prove who you are. This could include

a Canadian driver’s license;
a Canadian passport;
a Canadian provincial photo id card
a Canadian Certificate of Indian Status;
a Canadian Permanent Resident Card;
a Canadian Citizenship Card with a photo (not the older cards); or
a QC Health Card with a photo (not the older cards)

You will also need to bring proof of your residence address. This is usually proven by an official document with your mailing address on it, such as

a lease or mortgage statement,
a municipal tax notice,
an income tax assessment
a vehicle ownership certificate or
other items listed on the website.

For a youth, living in their parents’ home, however, very few of these documents are applicable. In fact, my relative had to use his school report card to show his residence!

He went off to the Post Office at the nearby mall. After a 5 minute wait in line and a 2 minute interaction with the Canada Post employee, he was done.

He signed at the Canada Post outlet to provide a sample signature for his cheques.

His Tangerine Chequing Account was fully opened. Now to get that job!

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Did you open a Tangerine bank account before opening an account at another bank? Did the id verification process work well for you? Please share your experience with a comment.

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Review: Why I Won’t Recommend Opening an Account at Zag Bank

Posted on 2016 04 16 by BetCrooks

I’m a bit miffed: hundreds of people successfully signed up with Zag Bank this January to take advantage of a limited time high interest rate of 2.5% on a savings account but I am not one of them. Instead, my attempt to open an account with Zag Bank went very poorly and although each person I’ve spoken with has been very pleasant they were unable to resolve the problem and unable to explain what went wrong and how it was fixed.

Why Did I Want a Zag Bank High Interest Savings Account and Why Am I Not Too Interested Now?

I wanted to open an account at Zag Bank because they had a promotional interest rate of 2.5% from January to May 31 2016. I have some large short-term savings for a home reno and hoped to make more than the current 0.8% offered by Tangerine and PC Financial.
Since then, EQ Bank launched offering an interest rate of 3% on a daily interest savings account. Although I started after I applied to open an account at Zag, my EQ Bank account is already open, I’ve tested transfers in and out of the account, and I’ve parked my cash there.

The EQ Bank 3% rate started in January 2016 and could end at any time (UPDATE: It’s dropping to 2.25% on April 18 2016) , which is partly why I was hoping to open a Zag Bank account. I planned to use it if the EQ Bank rate dropped significantly before May 31.

Anyway, given that my EQ Bank account is working well I’m really not interested in trying any more to open an account at Zag.

The Comedy of Errors Began With a Mistake Made Purely By Me

Probably I would have a fully functional account if I had not made a mistake when first applying to Zag Bank. My mistake was that I made my first deposit cheque payable to myself rather than payable to Zag Bank. (When I opened accounts at other banks, that was how I made my first deposits.) I admit I did not read the instructions properly.

Yes, I was wrong!

Because the cheque was not made payable to Zag Bank, they refused to cash it, per their policy. Fair enough.

I mailed that cheque in on January 14.

On January 22, they sent me an email stating that they had not received a cheque from me and could I please mail one in or deposit one by taking a photo of it using an app. Their note said to ignore the note if I had already mailed in a cheque. So I ignored it.

Finally, on January 26, someone from Zag Bank phoned me to tell me that they could not cash the cheque I had mailed in because it was payable to myself, not to Zag Bank.

My First Conversation with the Zag Bank Customer Service Line Leaves Me Disquieted

Soon after they called me, I phoned Zag Bank to ask about the cheque they refused to cash.

I wanted to know

where was the cheque? Were they mailing it back to me? (If so, I figured I could correct the “payable to” to read Zag Bank, initial it, and mail it back in.)
if they weren’t mailing it back, were they going to keep it and deposit it after my account was fully opened? (After all, in general I will be mailing in cheques payable to myself so I can make deposits in the account.)

The answers were disquieting.

First, they would not accept a cheque that had been corrected and initialed. Why? I have no idea. I’ve corrected cheques and initialed them many times. It would be against their policy, though, I was told.

Also, I was told, once a cheque had been “dishonoured” by their system, it would be automatically rejected.

Second, the agent said that the cheque was “probably” shredded and only an image of it still existed although they weren’t actually sure where that image was! So mailing it back wouldn’t be an option.

I said I wasn’t really happy knowing a cheque was floating around that could be cashed out, even to myself, at any time which could cause my chequing account to go into overdraft. However, I agreed it sounded unlikely that it would happen and decided to let the matter drop.

I agreed to write a brand new cheque with a brand new date on it and made payable this time to Zag Bank, not me, and use their photo cheque deposit app to submit it.

How Well Did Using the Zag Bank App to Deposit a Cheque By Photo Work?

It catastrophically failed.

The image of the cheque went missing and no one could find it.

What Happened When I Tried to Deposit My Cheque to Zag Bank Using the App?

I thought it went perfectly.

I opened the email note with the “one time” link to use the App to take a photo of my cheque and deposit it. This was on January 28 2016.

I took a photo as requested of both the front and back of the cheque.

It submitted and I received a happy face message telling me that my cheque should be processed and my account fully opened within 5 business days. So I made a note of it and got on with my life.

After 6 business days, my cheque had still not cleared my bank and I saw no signs of life on my Zag Bank account when I signed in.

On about February 10, 2016, I phoned Zag to find out whether my cheque had been processed.

Zag Bank Had No Record of My Cheque Image

There was no sign of the image from my cheque anywhere at Zag. The agent I spoke to on the phone was very polite and helpful but he could not really do anything since there was nothing to work with. He agreed to have the matter looked into. I was told that someone would either phone me, or would send me a “secure email” on my Zag Bank account page. I said if I didn’t hear back that I would phone them to see what they discovered when they looked for the image.

By Wednesday February 17, I had not received a phone call or an email, so I called Zag Bank.

Again, I spoke with a very pleasant helpful agent who confirmed there was still no sign of the image of my cheque. She offered to have a supervisor phone me in the afternoon but I declined because I would be busy then.

I asked if I could just submit the image of the cheque again.

Why Can’t I Submit an Image of my Cheque to Zag Bank If They Never Received the First One?

The agent was not sure whether this approach would work. She found and successfully re-sent my “welcome” email to me. I said I would use it to re-send the image of the cheque and hung up. (Bad mistake on my part.)

As soon as I opened the link in the email I was told I could not send any image of a cheque in to Zag Bank because I had already done so.

Sigh.

I phoned back in to Zag Bank and spoke with yet another very helpful, courteous customer service agent.

She suggested I could

mail in a new cheque.
try opening a totally different brand new Zag Bank account and deposit a new cheque either by mail or by using the App.

I don’t want to do either.

I’ve already paid for two cheques from my bank. I’ve already paid for one envelope and one stamp. I have spent about an hour in total now on the phone. I have NOTHING to show for these expenses or time.

I have lost faith and the thought of spending more money and time trying to get this process to work is not appealing.

Why Can’t the Zag Bank App Let Me Send In a New Image of My Cheque?

All I can say is that they must be using a very unforgiving computer program if there is NO WAY to send in an image of a cheque if the first image is rejected or lost.

The staff at Zag Bank do seem to want to help me fix this problem. It just appears that it is their computer system that is running the bank, not the other way around.

Why Don’t I Just Try Again?

I’m 98% sure that if I mail in a brand new cheque or if I try to open a second account with a brand new cheque it will all go perfectly.

The thing is, I’ve lost faith in Zag’s ability to resolve a fairly simple problem. It leaves me uneasy about how they would handle it if something major went wrong, like a transfer in or out from the bank “disappeared” in transit.

I’ve decided to just “let it go” for now. I’m stubborn, so I might try to open an account again in the future, but for now, I give up.

And Then The Cheque Was Mysteriously Found and Cashed and Deposited in My Zag Account!

And then after my last phone call with Zag, I received an email from Zag Bank dated February 19 welcoming me and stating they had now deposited my cheque and my account was fully active!

I wrote an email to customer service asking how and where my cheque’s image had been found. The answer I received was unsatisfactory as it did not say what had happened between when I sent in the image on January 28 and when they processed it on February 19. (The cheque cleared from my chequing account on February 23.)

The response was apologetic, kind and courteous but uninformative. “This was a rare occurrence, and I would not worry about it happening again in the future. Again, I am sorry that it took some time to locate the cheque, and deposit it for you.”

I’m sorry too because I’m so uneasy about what happened that I haven’t had the nerve to send any more money into Zag. I may in future because I have seen reviews from dozens of other people who have never had a problem but I am not eager to try again.

Luckily, because this was a “test” cheque the amount was not large. It did not put over-draw my chequing account. If it had been a significant sized cheque, though, it could have been a real problem.

Would I Recommend Zag Bank to Others?

No.

Even though I’ve seen testimony from dozens of others that their account was opened easily and is working fine, I would not recommend Zag Bank. It didn’t go well for me so I won’t recommend it.

I’ll admit that I’m not really happy that each time I have had to reach out to Zag Bank to find out what is going on. So far, I have not received any messages from them reaching out to contact me about this missing cheque image.

I may try using Zag Bank myself in the future but I won’t be recommending them. It’s ok if I want to take a chance with my money but I won’t tell others to do that.