Sterling National Bank Avis 6

Don't do it. Brio will massively tie up your funds and charge you high fees for it. Once they show ACH transfers inbound clear and funds available, if you try transferring any funds out, there are additional holds placed on the originally cleared funds, as well as the transfer holds, making your available balance negative. Then transfers will fail due to lacking "available" funds, which were available at the time of transfer. Each fee for this is $35 and they do retry failed transfers without checking if the funds are currently "available". Then they will likely flag your account, request additional verification documents, and the account will be suspended for who knows how long until they get around to processing these documents. There seems to be good potential for a class action lawsuit against this bank - Brio/Webster.

DEFINITELY AVOID BRIODIRECT BANK. Application process is highly flawed; you probably will figure that out for yourself if you ignore the reviews and apply. Their amateurish use of biometrics is laughable.

Webster Bank (a.k.a. BrioDirect and formerly, Sterling Bank, suspended my account because I attempted to transfer funds out of my BrioDirect account. Consequently, I cannot withdraw ANY funds from my BrioDirect account. I have filed a complaint against Webster Bank with the OCC. If you want this to be YOUR experience, by all means, sign up for a BrioDirect (Webster Bank) account!

Reading Susan's and JC's complaint mirrors my own, exact same scenario: ACH transfers to verified external accounts, trial deposits, etc., but currently a large ACH transfer from Brio to an external account was debited over 11 days ago, and stopped by Brio, and then after multiple attempts by me to jump through Brio requests, which were never good enough, to verify an account that was already verified, I just gave up and requested the transfer be cancelled now 4 times: by phone, their encrypted email, a supervisor's email, and the internal account message service. All are just ignored and they have not returned my funds nor responded in any way for over a week. Their phone hold times are just ridiculous, 1-1.5 hours in not an exaggeration, or you're mysteriously disconnected around the 40 minute mark, all the while listening to a recording that they are, "experiencing extremely high call volume," Sure...all day, every day, from open to close...extremely high call volume. Add to that unhelpful, and unresponsive employees, who are not empowered to resolve problems, and you've got BrioDirect, aka Sterling Bank, aka Webster Bank.

I had no trouble depositing funds to the online savings account Brio of Webster Bank. However, I had no idea how difficult external transfers would be. I set up links with the usual small deposits to verify the other banks I planned to transfer with.

Several months later I attempted my first transfer. It was to a verified bank, Goldman Sachs, and I surely owned the bank account there as I had deposited $77,000 from G-S to Brio when setting up the account. They claimed the transfer failed due to security reasons! (found out later this is a standard "routine" when you try to actually use your linked accounts for outgoing funds). It was unclear but I needed to set up a log in and password to communicate by encryption to get help/information. It took 11 days for me to get the hold reversed (I gave up on ever getting it transferred), all the while getting no interest on the account. When I told the rep I was planning to close the account, she informed me that I was now getting bumped up to 2.6%. I looked everywhere on the website and found nothing to that effect. Then, I read some of the reviews and apparently, you have to CLOSE the Brio account and set up a Brio PLUS account to get the higher rate. If I'd not heard other people's accounts of this grifter bank I never would have known about this specific deception. Some of these tricks have to be illegal?!

This review is about BrioDirect, which belongs to Webster Bank. My spouse and I deeply regret being BrioDirect customers and we are about to close our savings account once we get our money back.

1. We made a transfer that didn't go through for security reasons. Very well! But it has been 8 days and they have not processed any reversed transfer yet. We contacted them multiple times but nothing has been done for us to get our money back. At this point, we believe they are delaying the reversed transfer to earn interest on our backs.

2. Good luck if you want to speak to a BrioDirect representative. It takes forever for them to either answer your call or call you back. In our case, it takes about 1.5-2 hours on average to reach a bank representative. This is very frustrating, and by any reasonable standard, unacceptable.

Therefore, I cannot recommend in good conscience this online bank to anyone. If you still want to open a bank account - in particular, because of their savings account's high APY (as of 7/8/2022) - please, be careful and do your due diligence.

Update (7/12/2022): It has been 12 days since the failed/rejected transfer and our money is still held hostage at BrioDirect/Sterling National Bank/Webster Bank