Santander Direct Deposit
As you may know, Santander offers a checking account which pays out a $20 bonus per month when certain conditions are met, including a qualifying direct deposit of $1500+.
We reported that Santander is cracking down on what counts as Direct Deposit and that ordinary ACH transfers no longer work to trigger the bonus. At that time, a few options things were still working: Alliant, Chase, Capital One, Serve, and Paypal. The key was that if it didn’t come up as ‘P2P’ it would work.
Since then we noted that Santander added into the terms that deposits made by an individual will not work. They specifically note Paypal as an example of something which will not qualify as a direct deposit.
Now Enforced
At the time, we didn’t have confirmed reports of the change. Now, a report came in that Capital One is no longer working to trigger the bonus. They’re actually enforcing the updated terms and Paypal probably won’t work either.
Note that not only will you lose the bonus by not having a real direct deposit, you’ll also get hit with a $10 monthly fee as a result. Use it or close it.
Other Options
One upside of the new terms is that they explicitly allow other types of business payments to qualify as a direct deposit. Very technically, a direct deposit is payment from an employer. Payment from Amazon to an Amazon seller, for example, wouldn’t be included. (Although this has always worked in practice, it may not be included in the actual terms.) They now specifically mention that such transactions should satisfy the requirement.
Direct deposits include deposits made by your employer or a federal or state government agency or retirement benefits administrator and generally payments made by corporations or other organizations. It does not include deposits to your Account that are made by an individual using online banking or an Internet payment provider such as PayPal.
Using these terms, Amazon sellers should be okay with payment from Amazon. Likewise, those who sell to gift card exchanges and get paid via direct deposit (usually bulk sellers), would be able to use those deposits to satisfy the requirement.
I actually want to use this myself. As a bulk seller on Raise, I get my sales direct-deposited to Santander and this should work to trigger the bonus.
Does it actually work? I’m not sure yet. It comes up as ‘WWW.RAISE.COM TRANSFER’ which does not sound good. We’ll have to wait and see….
