Why Genoa Bank Is a Bad Choice for Your Money

A Community Bank Without Much To Offer 

Although Genoa Bank has been around since 1902, we were pretty disappointed by what we found. 

While they offer basic banking services like checking accounts and credit cards, as well as basic small business banking services, we thought nearly every product had a better alternative than competitors. 

Their technology left a lot to be desired as well. We weren’t comforted by the extend of their location or ATM network either. 

We always like to look at customer feedback and happiness and transparency as well. Unfortunately, this bank is so small it was actually hard to find data and information here, which is not comforting when you’re talking about a banking institution. 

They Do Cover The Very Basics At Genoa Bank, Just Not well

Like most community banks, Genoa Bank has all the basic services covered. For personal banking, there are:

• Checking and savings accounts
• CDs and IRAs
• Debit and credit card options

Businesses can also have their basic banking needs covered with Genoa Bank including:

• Business checking accounts
• Commercial loans
• Merchant card processing

Unfortunately, the rates offered on these products are dismal.

For example, the savings account all offered terribly low rates, basically zero. Remember, when you put money in a savings account with this low of a rate you’re just locking in losses to inflation – guaranteeing you will lose money. 

It’s not much better as you look around at their other products. Neither of their credit cards offers any rewards, for example. 

The final nail in the coffin was when we found the rate for their HELOC product. It’s a staggering, whopping, unbelievable 20%! We’ve never seen a HELOC rate that high anywhere! So you get the privilege of pledging your house as collateral, only to have to pay credit card level rates – yikes! 

Their technology stack did not give us great comfort

While Genoa offers online and mobile banking, their offering here looks quite basic. Just simple options like the ability to check balances and initiate transfers. If you want to initiate a personal loan, for example, you’re not directed to a slick online wizard, like with most banks, but are instead encouraged to contact a branch manager. That’s even just to find out basic information, like current rates. 

Much of their website looks like it desperately needs to be updated and modernized.

With only 6 physical branches to visit, Genoa in particular needs to have a rock-solid, modern, fully functional tech stack, so that its customers can be confident they can do everything they need to from their computer or phone. 

Customer satisfaction is a bit unclear

Typically we like to survey a number of review and rating sites, as well as look for participating in popular customer satisfaction surveys like those done by JD Power, to get a sense of how much customers are liking a bank.

Unfortunately, with Genoa, it’s so small that we ran into a lack of data. While there are a few scattered reviews here and there, there isn’t enough to really strongly say whether customers are liking Genoa or not.

So this was left as an open question for us.

We weren’t able to find much publicly disclosed information about the state of the bank

The vast majority of banks, even ones that are privately held, release annual (or more often) statements about the current financial condition of the bank. Typically this involves, at a minimum, a current balance sheet, an income statement from the previous period, and a brief commentary from the bank’s leadership.

This is done because banks can only really continue to operate as long as their customer continues to have confidence in them. Banks are in the confidence business, so when they have strong balance sheets, they have no problem letting everyone know.

However, we were not able to find any public disclosures available from Genoa Bank, something we really did not like.