One Finance Shutdown Due to Crypto? And Reinstatement.

It isn’t often that you see shutdown and reinstatement data point being shared at once but here we are. One Finance is one of my favorite fintech. I like them so much that most of my direct deposit goes to them. Why shouldn’t it? After all they incentivize direct deposit with 3% APY on up to 10% of direct deposit. Anyway, as you might have noticed I have been doing a little bit of crypto here and there and I, for whatever reason, chose to do withdraw/deposit cash to/from exchanges to my One Finance account.

The money I was moving wasn’t anything too crazy. I was moving a few hundred dollars in and out, its just that I happened to do it every couple of days. And vast majority of the outgoing money was through debit card (yay to 30 day of no card fee on CDC). Eventually my 30 day time runout, so I attempted to add CDC’s bank information, did the manual deposit verification, and that’s where things got interesting. They wanted me to provide a PDF copy to show that the account was really mine, I ignored (and hindsight this was probably a mistake) the email, and ended up transferring money to CDC through another bank.

We wanted to follow up and make sure you received this request for additional information to link your external bank account.

Your external bank account needs verification before you can use it with One for transferring funds. While we can sometimes verify account ownership automatically, we weren’t able to do so for this account so we’ll need some extra help.

In order to verify this external account for use with One, please reply to this message with a PDF copy of an account statement dated in the past 60 days. Until you submit documentation, your account will remain in a Pending status.

After you send this to us, we’ll review and can typically allow transfers within 2-3 business days. If we run into any questions, we’ll let you know.

I think what this did was put an eye on my account. Around this time I had also transferred $400 to Celsius (I really want them $50 in bitcoin) using Wyre so this could have also done the trick. Regardless, I assume they didn’t like everything they saw in my account as I soon got a shutdown letter:

This letter is a notification that your One account has been identified for closure due to activity inconsistent with the obligations set forth in the account opening agreements.

Please provide the account and routing number where you would like the funds remaining in your account transferred. Once this is completed, your One account will be closed.

Sincerely,

The One Team

Please reach out with any questions or concerns to this email. The Risk Team is not reachable by chat or phone.

I appealed the shutdown telling them exactly what I was doing and I also provided documentation they had asked for the external account I had added. A day later I got an email from their risk time saying my account was no longer on what they called “temporary hold”:

Your account is now active and available for use. We apologize for any inconvenience the temporary hold may have caused. We appreciate your patience during this process, and look forward to having you as a One customer.

Best Regards,

One Risk Team

Then roughly 20 minutes later I got an email from their customer service saying that my external account was approved and I should keep the first transfer under $500.

Thank you for providing this documentation. This connection has been approved and you may now transfer funds between One and the external account.

As this connection is new, please keep your first transfer under $500. Once successful, subsequent transfers from this account can be larger.

Closing Thoughts

The big takeaway is that you should probably do push/pulls to/from crypto exchanges in account that you don’t care too much about. The second take away was that deposit from CDC codes as direct deposit. I should make it clear that I wasn’t trying to max out 3% APY on monthly direct deposit or anything nor was I anywhere close maxing it out.