If you participate in any bank bonuses, you know that one of the most common requirements is that you complete a direct deposit above a certain amount to trigger the sign up bonus. Usually the fine print will state it has to be a employer payroll or government benefit. Changing which bank your employer uses might be OK if you do it once or twice, but if you start asking for it to be changed every month then your payroll department might start getting annoyed.
Thankfully, there are work arounds and lots of them. Unfortunately every bank is different. Some banks will allow any ACH transfer to trigger the bonus, whilst once banks will allow a brokerage account transfer to trigger the bonus. Some bonuses will not trigger with an ACH transfer from one bank, but they will work from another page. Awhile back I created the “List Of Methods Banks Count As Direct Deposits” page. To compile all of these different data points, I regularly update it from various difference sources.
How To Use This Page
People are often confused about how to use this page, so here is my simple guide. In my example I’m going to pretend that I’m trying to research what will trigger the direct deposit requirement for Chase bank bonuses.
1. Select the bank that’s offering the bonus. You can either scroll down and click on this or use ctrl+f to search for your bank and then click it.
2. You’ll now see “the following count as direct deposits” along with a whole heap of different names and numbers and then further down “the following don’t count as a direct deposit”. What you’re looking for is a financial institution that you have an account with. Let’s say I have Alliant, American Express Serve & Capital One 360 accounts.
3. Alliant and Capital One 360 are both listed as not working, so I know that transferring money from those accounts to Chase will not trigger the bonus. American Express is listed as working, so it should work.
4. Now I can click on the numbers next to American Express to see how old the data is. The higher the number, the newer the data. The newest data point is from March 2014. That is relatively recent so I’ll try that.
5. Success, it worked and I received my bonus. Time to go celebrate! Not so fast! That page would be more useful if others knew that American Express serve worked in December 2014, so I’ll scroll to the bottom and write in the comments section “I used American Express serve for Chase and it worked in December 2014. Thanks for this resource page”
The more people that contribute the better this page comes. I know a lot of you use it, people usually don’t report something unless it’s to say something doesn’t work. Please let me know when something does work, that way I can update the page and people can be sure that it worked more recently.
If you’re doing bank bonuses, you might also find the following pages helpful:
