How to switch business banks, when 83 per cent of the record is about not choosing the date
A year of federal complaints about closing an account, split three ways. Why the bank is forbidden to tell you the reason, which companies give the money back and which do not, and the order of operations for a switch you did not plan.
The advice I used to give about switching business banks was a checklist, and the checklist was fine. Move the incoming payments first. Never close the old account on the day the last payment leaves it. Keep a list of everything holding your card number, because that list is always longer than anybody thinks.
I still stand behind all of it. People keep arriving at this page searching how to switch business banks, and that list is what I gave them. I had also been answering a question that, in most of the cases in the federal record, nobody ever got to ask. This is the corrected version.
I went looking for the numbers behind my own advice and pulled every complaint filed about closing a bank account in the twelve months to 1 July. There are 11,233 of them. It took me an afternoon to read the shape of the file rather than the stories inside it, and what came out is that switching banks and being switched are two different events wearing one word, and that I had been writing about the smaller one.
What the file is actually made of
Start with proportion, because it surprised me more than anything else here. In that year the Bureau logged 84,218 complaints about checking and savings accounts. Closing an account accounts for 11,233 of them, which is 13.3 per cent, and it sits third behind “Managing an account” on 48,275 and problems with companies charging your account on 11,876. Opening an account produced 7,414.
More people file a federal complaint about the end of a banking relationship than about the start of one, by a margin of about three to two. I would not have guessed that, and I think it says something about which part of the relationship gets designed.
The split inside those 11,233 is what changed my advice. The Bureau tags them under three labels. “Company closed your account” covers 5,419 rows. “Funds not received from closed account” covers 3,938. “Can't close your account” covers the remaining 1,643.
Read the 3 labels in that order. Only the last one describes a customer trying to leave. The first describes a decision made about you, and the second describes the aftermath of one, so 9,357 rows out of 11,233, or roughly 83 per cent of this file, are a relationship that ended on the bank's schedule rather than on yours.
My checklist covered 1,643 situations out of 11,233. I had it wrong for two years in the way that is hardest to notice, which is that everything I said was true and it was aimed at the wrong group.
Why nobody will tell you the reason
This is the part I understood late, and I think it is the most useful thing on the page, so I am putting it near the top rather than at the end.
When an account closes and the bank will not say why, people escalate. They ask for a manager, they write to a head office, they demand something in writing, and they get a letter saying the bank may close an account at its discretion. It reads like stonewalling. Some proportion of the time it is not stonewalling at all, because the answer is one that federal law forbids the bank to give.
A bank that suspects a transaction files a report with the Treasury. The rule requires it for anything that “involves or aggregates at least $5,000 in funds or other assets” where the bank “knows, suspects, or has reason to suspect” one of the listed grounds, and the third ground is broad enough to catch ordinary business: a transaction that “has no business or apparent lawful purpose or is not the sort in which the particular customer would normally be expected to engage”.
Then comes the sentence that explains the wall, and I would read it twice. “A SAR, and any information that would reveal the existence of a SAR, are confidential and shall not be disclosed except as authorized in this paragraph (e).” Directly under it sits the operative half. “No bank, and no director, officer, employee, or agent of any bank, shall disclose a SAR or any information that would reveal the existence of a SAR.”
The rule is 31 CFR 1020.320 and you can read the whole of it in about ten minutes. That is a prohibition on the bank rather than a policy of the bank, and I had spent years treating the two as the same thing. The same rule protects the institution from liability “for failure to provide notice of such disclosure to any person identified in the disclosure”, which removes whatever incentive was left to explain anything to you.
The timings underneath explain the delay you experience. A report is due “no later than 30 calendar days after the date of initial detection”, with another 30 available when no suspect has been identified, and never more than 60. The bank then keeps the report and its supporting documents for five years.
So the manager on the telephone may be looking at a screen that tells them nothing, or at a screen they are not allowed to read to you, and I do not think you can tell those two apart from where you are standing. Half the time I doubt the person on the telephone can either.
None of this makes every closure a suspicious activity report. Plenty are dormancy, a negative balance, a signature that never matched, or a line of business the bank has quietly decided it no longer wants. It does mean that pushing for a reason has a ceiling, that the ceiling is statutory, and that an afternoon spent escalating is an afternoon not spent moving your incoming payments.
The companies, and the column that separates them
The file names the company on every row, so here is the year by company, with the outcome column I would look at first.
The share column is closing complaints as a proportion of all that company's checking and savings complaints in the same year. The money column is how often a closing complaint ended with money going back to the person who filed it.
| Company | Closings | All complaints | Share | Money back |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| JPMorgan Chase & Co. | 1,501 | 9,579 | 15.7% | 3.7% |
| Bank of America, N.A. | 1,159 | 8,355 | 13.9% | 38.5% |
| Citibank, N.A. | 917 | 3,654 | 25.1% | 33.3% |
| Chime Financial Inc | 847 | 7,511 | 11.3% | 11.3% |
| Wells Fargo & Company | 754 | 9,732 | 7.7% | 6.5% |
| Block, Inc. | 615 | 3,752 | 16.4% | 0.0% |
| Capital One Financial Corporation | 599 | 3,920 | 15.3% | 1.7% |
| U.S. Bancorp | 465 | 2,397 | 19.4% | 5.6% |
| SoFi Technologies, Inc. | 372 | 2,221 | 16.7% | 7.8% |
| Truist Financial Corporation | 325 | 2,186 | 14.9% | 4.0% |
| PNC Bank N.A. | 199 | 1,998 | 10.0% | 4.0% |
| PayPal Holdings, Inc | 178 | 1,450 | 12.3% | 2.8% |
Two numbers in that table are worth more to me than the ranking. Bank of America returned money in 38.5 per cent of its closing complaints and JPMorgan Chase in 3.7 per cent of its, and those two sit next to each other at the top of the volume column with 1,159 and 1,501. Block returned money in 0 cases out of 615.
I would not read that column as a quality score in either direction, and I want to be careful here. A high rate can mean a company makes more errors that need paying for, and it can equally mean a company pays rather than argues. Both stories fit 38.5 per cent. What the column does describe is what happens after you complain, and if you are deciding where to put a second account, the distance between 38.5 and 0.0 is the largest single number on this page.
Across the whole file, 1,331 of the 11,233 complaints ended with money returned, which is 11.8 per cent. Another 733 ended with something fixed that was not money. The remaining 8,924 closed with an explanation and nothing else.
The public response column, which I keep rereading
A short digression, and it is no use to your switch whatsoever.
Companies can attach a public statement to a complaint. On this file, 4,487 of them chose the option labelled “Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response”. Exactly 283 chose “Company believes it acted appropriately as authorized by contract or law”.
I find that ratio hard to read past. The second option asserts a right that deposit agreements plainly give the bank, it costs nothing to select, and it is what every closure letter already says in longer words. Sixteen times as many companies preferred public silence. My guess is that it is a default setting in a compliance workflow rather than a decision anybody makes, and that is a guess with nothing behind it. Anyway, back to the practical half.
What I would do now
Open the second account before you need it, and put real traffic through it. That is the entire strategy and the rest is detail.
A second bank that has never seen a payment from you is not a backup. It is an application form you filled in early, and the day you need it is the day it looks worst, because it will be taking its first ever transfer from a business whose main account has just been closed. Run one real payment through it every month. Any payment will do, and 200 dollars of a genuine supplier invoice does the job that 50,000 dollars sitting idle does not.
For a switch you control, the order is incoming before outgoing. Payroll files, acquirer settlements, marketplace payouts and anything with a long change window go first, and each has a lead time you cannot compress by wanting to. Outgoing payments follow those. Stored card details go last and will still be surfacing six months later, which is the part everybody underestimates, myself included.
Leave the old account open, funded and watched for two full cycles. A monthly fee on an account you no longer need is a small cost. A returned payment against a closed account is a supplier telephoning your customer, and the gap between those two costs is the reason the fee is worth paying twice.
If the closure was not your decision, the questions change completely. Get the notice in writing on day 1. Note the date the account stops accepting credits, which is normally earlier than the date it closes, and redirect incoming payments before you do anything else, because money already in flight is exactly where those 3,938 complaints come from. Ask what happens to the balance and by what method it comes back, in writing, since a cheque posted to a registered address is a different problem from a transfer, particularly when the registered address is an agent's office in another state.
Then file the complaint, understanding that you are filing for the balance and not for the explanation. The file says that works about 12 per cent of the time and that the explanation is not coming.
What this file cannot tell you
The database does not separate business accounts from personal ones, which is an awkward thing to admit halfway down a page aimed at business owners. I checked the sub-product tags and they run “Checking account” with 8,853, “Savings account” with 1,025, “Other banking product or service” with 1,064 and certificates of deposit with 291. There is no business line at all. So every figure here comes from a consumer complaint file and reaches a business question by inference, and the inference is mine rather than the Bureau's.
I also cannot tell you how many of the 11,233 closures were correct. This is a file of people who were unhappy, and a bank closing an account over a real fraud pattern produces exactly the same row as a bank closing the wrong account by mistake. The database records how the company resolved it, never who was right.
The file is also small against the population it comes from. Put 11,233 next to the tens of millions of accounts open in the country and it is a rounding error, so nothing here supports a claim about how often this happens. It supports a claim about what it looks like when it does, which is a weaker thing than I would like to be offering.
None of this is legal advice and we are not your compliance team. A closure that arrives alongside a law enforcement request, or one that freezes a balance rather than returning it, is a matter for a lawyer on the day rather than for a page like this one.
I keep thinking about the 3,938. Each one is somebody whose account closed and whose money then did not arrive, and no switching checklist has ever addressed that, mine least of all, because a checklist gets written by somebody who is choosing the date. I do not know what the median wait is in those cases. The Bureau does not record it, I have not found anybody who publishes it, and I spent longer looking for that one number than I did on the rest of this piece.
Sources
- CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, product Checking or savings account, complaints received 1 July 2025 to 1 July 2026: totals by issue, the three closing labels, company breakdown and outcomes. consumerfinance.gov. Pulled 4 August 2026.
- 31 CFR 1020.320, reports by banks of suspicious transactions: the 5,000 dollar threshold and the three grounds, the 30 and 60 day filing deadlines, the five year retention, the confidentiality prohibition in paragraph (e) and the limitation on liability in paragraph (f). ecfr.gov. Checked 4 August 2026.