Santander Pulls Extra20 Checking for New Applicants (free $240 per year)

Santander has a great checking account bonus which pays out $20 per month that a qualifying $1500 direct deposit and two bill pays are done each month, see Santander $20 Per Month Bonus When You Sign Up For Their Extra20 Bundle. They did crack down on what’s considered direct deposit, but many of us are still enjoying the free $240 annually without doing a thing by having $1500 direct deposited and having automatic bill pays set up.

This account is no longer available for new signups as of today, November 22, 2015. Existing customers are apparently still enrolled in the program as we haven’t gotten any communication to the contrary.

There were first rumors of this around a month ago and I reached out to our media contact at Santander for comment: “We continually review our products and services in light of evolving customer preferences and we don’t have any product changes to announce at this time”. But the rumors have now been proven correct. When you try pulling up the account from Google search, you’ll get error messages from all the pages.(Use Google Cache to see what the pages used to look like.) I did find one page where the offer was still showing, but clicking on that page resulted in an error message.

This is likely the reason that they’ve been pushing a different bonus recently, see Santander $150 Checking Account Bonus, as they’ve chosen the single payment of $150 as their customer acquisition cost versus the continuous $20 monthly payments.

Let’s hope the $20 monthly bonus sticks around for existing customers.