How Mint is Helping Users Prevent Overdraft Fees

An overdraft fee can be a headache and often one of the most expensive fees from a bank. Minters, there’s a good chance that at some point in the last year, you have seen the dreaded “NSF Fee” transaction on your bank statement. Trust us, we’ve all been there, and we want to share an exciting update behind our overdraft prediction feature.

For those unfamiliar with the term, NSF, or Non Sufficient Funds, is when a customer tries to make a purchase without enough funds in their bank account to cover the transaction. The amount overdrawn incurs interest at a rate determined by the account provider and likely some additional (hefty) fees. For example, on your bank account if you overdraw by a minimal amount, event $1, you may be on the hook for a $30 (or more!) NSF fee per the terms you agreed to when you signed on for your account.

This can really add up. Every year, U.S. consumers pay more than $15 billion in fees for overdrafting their checking accounts. On Mint, we were able to see that $250 million in NSF Fees are paid out annually to our top 5 banks alone. With so many of you entrusting us with your financial data, it is our goal to give you plenty of notice to stop incurring these preventable charges.

Our overdraft prediction feature is a smart technology leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict when you are likely to result in an overdraft in the next few days, based on your spending patterns. The feature is now open to Minters using the top 3 banks in the US. To date, we’ve sent more than 650,000 alerts and saved Minters over $900,000 a year.

As our team continues to work to make our overdraft prediction more accurate, more timely, and available for more banks, we hope it provides you with the assurance that overdraft fees will no longer sneak up on you!