"We also mentioned we would be making changes to your Personal Deposit Agreement "

"When your GIC reaches its maturity date, we will pay out your principal amount and accrued and unpaid interest and again send you a cheque to the mailing address that we have on file. This will replace any maturity or renewal instructions previously provided to us or described in your initial GIC confirmation."

"In the new PDA, we limit our responsibility for funds lost in transit or in standard mail."

So they changed the PDA without consultation, will send payments by cheque only, and will not be responsible for funds lost in transit. What is going on?

➡ https://www.highinterestsaving.....h-closure/

.
Wyth Financial will soon be no-more.

Dean

Your HISA account will be closed by Wyth Financial on May 2, 2023.
…

Please transfer the funds in your existing Wyth HISA via Interac e-Transfer® or to one of your online linked accounts before May 1, 2023. If you need assistance doing this, please contact us through the online platform, at 1.800.… or answers@wyth.ca.

And of course by early redemption the released funds can be .... which can be worth ... 🙂 You can fill in BF purchase in the blanks lol

AltaRed said
I am surprised (what I expected) the default option is not to roll the Wyth HISA into an EQ Bank HISA rather than account closure.  

Was a bit surprised as well, though after a bit of consideration, perhaps not such a bad thing either. EQ seems to be a bit hit and miss with customer satisfaction.

Definitely sad to see Wyth go though. Was pretty satisfied with it for what I needed and it was so easy to set up and use.

TommyT said

Long EQB? Why on earth would you pick that one to be long?
I've been short EQB and Home Capital since March this year.
Both are third tier lenders exposed to the Ontario housing market.  

When u say short, u mean sell short the stock or ??

or similar play on words?

Cheers,
Doug

I'd suggest EQB is now more diversified than any of its relatively direct competition, i.e. Home Capital, Laurentian Bank and Canadian Western Bank. It may well be worth being a shareholder some day but maybe not now, and not if one is more inclined to own one or more of the big six.

TommyT said

Long EQB? Why on earth would you pick that one to be long?
I've been short EQB and Home Capital since March this year.
Both are third tier lenders exposed to the Ontario housing market.  

I wouldn't classify them as "third tier lenders." It's true that I lost money on Street Capital Bank of Canada, but Street Capital had a different corporate structure and a different business model. The Concentra business significantly diversifies the business of EQB Inc. from being more of a pure-play deposit and mortgage issuer.

Home Capital Group does have some added business risk relative to EQB, and I don't like that it's even less diversified than before (i.e., no merchant payments business and limited other businesses). On the other hand, they have done so many significant issuer bids in recent years, their outstanding share float is now even significantly less than before the Buffett capital injection and share issuance. They've got something like 61-62 million shares outstanding. That's a lot of share buybacks. It's still not my preference, but I do expect them to either continue the share buybacks or increasing their dividend (probably the latter now, with the federal government's 2% announced share buyback tax, which I actually weak-ishly support).

Cheers,
Doug

AltaRed said
I never had anything with Wyth so don't know what EQ will do with Wyth GICs (if there are such things). In the case of Concentra Bank GICs sold through brokerages, I would expect they will just continue on to maturity since I believe Concentra Bank will continue as an entity. Concentra Trust will certainly continue as an entity.

When Desjardins wrapped up Zag Bank (albeit a slightly different case than an acquisition), they handled it in a couple of different ways. The primary way was to buy out the GIC with full interest to end of term....just to get rid of them, and that was a super deal for the investor. I think that process was limited to GICs maturing in less than 2 years. I think longer term ones were allowed to carry on to maturity albeit my memory is a little foggy now.  

Yes, and to be clear, in reply to RetirEd's post #15, I never said Wyth GICs wouldn't be continuing. However, that doesn't mean that EQB Inc. will continue to maintain four bank and trust subsidiaries. They could very easily amalgamate the Concentra Bank business into Equitable Bank and the Equitable Trust business into Concentra Trust, renaming the latter as Equitable Trust, and all existing GIC terms and maturities would be maintained. I suspect they will do this.

Note this is only for direct-to-consumer GICs, which are problematic to maintain in a separate platform. The brokered GICs are much, much easier to transfer across legal entities.

To RetirEd's point, yes, Ally was actually bigger in HISAs. They had something like $1-1.5 billion in HISA deposits at their peak, if I remember correctly. They closed the HISAs and paid them out to one of the customer's linked external accounts. GICs of ResMor Trust Company were continued by RBC Royal Bank, but under their existing terms and maturities. That's why I say the Wyth/EQB approach is very similar to Ally Canada in so many ways. Zag Bank is also very similar, with the above noted difference AltaRed mentioned. (His memory is the same as mine.)

Cheers,
Doug

Loonie said
No doubt it can be done, but it's not exactly the Welcome Wagon! Not everyone has an account with EQ and clearly they don't care if you never do.

I don't have an account with Wyth, and almost no money at EQ. EQ is a bank of last resort for me and will remain so. It certainly deserves its place among the "Big Seven".  

EQ Bank could easily go bankrupt or insolvent. Like I said before Home Trust, Home Bank, Canadian Western Bank and EQ Bank all of them could go bankrupt.

Doug said

It's a bit surprising, yes, given this was the approach RBC Royal Bank took when they bought Ally Canada's deposit business. However, I suspect the account closures apply only to Concentra Bank direct-to-consumer HISAs, which was likely a very marginal business (a couple hundred million, at most). Broker HISAs, direct-to-consumer GICs and broker GICs will likely be migrated.

Nonetheless, we knew this was coming.

It's all about squeezing out every marginal dollar of costs and doubling EQ Bank's book of business.

Cheers,
Doug

Full and fair disclosure: As of October 2022, I am now a common stockholder in EQB Inc., parent company of Equitable and Concentra banks/trusts.  

Long EQB? Why on earth would you pick that one to be long?
I've been short EQB and Home Capital since March this year.
Both are third tier lenders exposed to the Ontario housing market.

Norman1 said
Equitable Bank hasn't been interested in more savings account money from its EQ Bank channel for a while. The EQ Bank savings account pays only 2½%.

Equitable Bank likely isn't too keen on receiving yet more savings account money from the Wyth savings accounts that have been paying a lower 2¼%.

Equitable Bank does seem more interested in brokerage ISA deposits. The Equitable HISA (EQB1000) now pays 3.3%!  

Exactly. This almost ensures that EQ will remain noncompetitive with HISA, or in the same breath, it provides the reason why EQ has fallen off a competitive cliff for so many weeks.