JPMorgan Chase, checking account fees

The head of America’s biggest retail bank has a warning for its 86 million customers: Prepare to pay for your bank accounts.

Marianne Lake runs Chase Bank, the sprawling franchise inside JPMorgan Chase that is the country’s biggest bank for consumers and one of its biggest credit-card issuers. Lake is warning that new rules that would cap overdraft and late fees will make everyday banking significantly more expensive for all Americans. 

Lake said Chase is planning to pass on the costs of higher regulation and charge customers for a number of now-free services, including checking accounts and wealth-management tools, if the rules become law in their current form. She expects her peers in the industry will follow suit.

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“The changes will be broad, sweeping and significant,” Lake said. “The people who will be most impacted are the ones who can least afford to be, and access to credit will be harder to get.” 

This isn’t the first time banks have said they would pass on higher costs to consumers when regulators have attempted to cap their fees. In 2010, after the post-financial crisis overhaul of bank regulations, lenders warned that they would levy fees on debit cards because of a cap on some card charges—but few ended up doing so because consumers threatened to move their business. Some consumer advocates say this time is no different. 

“The banks say that their only option is to pass on their costs to customers, but that’s not true,” said Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, an economics think tank that is in favor of the proposed bank regulations. “Yet again, banks are dressing up their attempts to maximize their own profit under the guise of what’s good or bad for customers.” 

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Banks are saying this time could be different because of the scale of new financial regulations coming out of Washington. Agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are proposing an $8 cap on credit-card late payment fees and a $3 cap for overdrafting bank accounts. They are also planning to further limit debit-card fees and how much they can charge to software companies like Venmo and CashApp for accessing and using their customers’ data. On top of that, new bank capital rules would make it harder for banks to lend by requiring them to…