The Price of Convenience

Chevy Chase Bank blankets the region with ATMs and charges non-customers up to $2.25 to use them. In many places, there is no other choice.

Train stations, ballparks, amusement parks, mall food courts, grocery stores, Metrorail tunnels, and a few steps from the panda exhibit at the National Zoo.

Capping a costly 10-year campaign of cash-machine shock and awe, Chevy Chase Bank this summer surpassed the 1,000 mark in its bid to saturate the area with automated teller machines. The ATM rollout, a strategy pushed by owner and chief executive B. Francis Saul II, has been a boon for Chevy Chase customers, and imprinted the bank's logo across a region where banking competition is intense.

For the rest of the world it has meant millions of dollars in fees, two bucks or more at a time.

Do you want to continue?

The fee Chevy Chase charges non-account holders to use its machines -- $2.25 in most cases -- generated about $20 million for the company last year. It also helped Washington earn the distinction of having the highest average ATM fees in the country, according to a twice-yearly survey of the charges by consumer-finance Web site Bankrate.com.

According to the survey, the average ATM surcharge imposed by area banks is $1.83, compared with a national average of $1.60. Chevy Chase's fees are second only to a small Pittsburgh bank, which charges non-customers $2.50 to use its ATMs.

Though nearly all banks charge non-account holders to use their machines, the Chevy Chase ATMs -- ubiquitous by design -- are hard to escape.

"I don't really like them, and I try to avoid them every chance I get," Bill McVay, a businessman traveling through Baltimore's Amtrak station, said as he got socked with a surcharge to withdraw cash from a Chevy Chase ATM. He does a lot of business travel, and Chevy Chase's ATMs are in every area airport and most Amtrak stations under agreements the company negotiated with local transit agencies, including Metro. "There are plenty of times when you simply can't avoid them."

With 1,018 ATMs, Chevy Chase has more than twice as many machines here than even the much larger Bank of America.

From a consumer's standpoint, it is one of the conundrums of modern banking. Technology has let money and information move faster and cheaper, and made banks far more efficient. Yet the fees charged for the convenience of such improvements have for the past decade been the fastest-growing part of banking industry revenue.

Banks lump together all such deposit-related fees, such as bounced-check penalties and online banking charges, so it is almost impossible to determine how much ATMs contribute to the bottom line. Banks won't disclose the exact numbers for competitive reasons.

Analysts and consumer advocates suspect that it is a significant amount. The cost of processing a "foreign" ATM transaction -- in which a customer of one bank uses another bank's machine -- can be as low as 30 cents. Yet customers may pay more than $4 for the privilege -- a surcharge fee from the owner of the ATM and, often, a "foreign bank fee" of up to $2 charged by the consumer's bank.