Enjoy Lower Electronic Services Fees in 2000

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The Year 2000 fee changes for Federal Reserve services are effective Monday, April 3. As you may recall, the Federal Reserve System elected to defer its annual price changes to accommodate financial institutions' efforts to prepare for the Year 2000 and leap year rollovers. A listing of several of the significant price changes follows.

• Prices across all electronic payment services will decline, reflecting lower fees for Fedwire funds and securities online transfers, as well as ACH transactions. Fees will remain unchanged for electronic access options, the Fedwire-based net settlement service, and purchase and sale transactions.

• Because of the additional cost of processing offline funds and securities transfers, surcharge increases will range from $2 to $5.

• Forward collection fine sort fees will remain unchanged; however, the Eighth District is adopting a new standard fee range for return item, fine sort products. Specifically, City and RCPC fine sort packages will be priced at $10, City fine sort items at $0.10 and RCPC fine sort items at $0.12.

Additionally, there will be per-item fee increases for selected check services, including the Nationwide City Sort and Unsorted City Regular products. Detailed price changes for each office are available in the Federal Reserve's 2000 Services & Fees packet.

• An electronic cash letter (ECL) deposit option will be introduced for most forward collection products. ECL deposits arriving by the published deposit deadlines, and in accordance with specific deposit guidelines, will receive a $0.001 discount.

• Fees for municipal bond collections will decrease to $40 from $50 per bond, and the per-envelope fee for deposits containing six to 50 coupon envelopes will decrease to $2.50 from $3.

• There are no price changes for cash services across the District.

New Services & Fees packets containing complete 2000 price listings for all Fed services have been mailed to all financial institutions in the Eighth District. Pricing information is also available online at www.frbservices.org. Contact your local account executive for additional information.