Many people are unhappy with their bank, especially if they bank with one of the Big Four, but it seems that relatively few do anything about it. This is perhaps not surprising in light of the fact that financial institutions don't go out of their way to make it easy for a customer to switch, especially if you have a number of products bundled together with the one institution. (See my separate review of BankMECU for an account of what a hassle it was just to get a single item - a credit card - switched from one institution to another).

But if you can grit your teeth and put up with the hassle of switching, it can pay dividends.

Some people may believe that the solution lies with the smaller banks. So did I, once. Many moons ago now, I got tired of the poor service at one of the Big Four, and decided to transfer my business to one of the little banks that had sprung up in the wake of the financial deregulation of the early 1980s. For a while, life was good and I was happy. Problem is, that little bank got taken over by another, which got taken over by another, which finally got taken over by one of the Big Four. I was back where I'd started.

There has to be another solution, I thought. And there is. Try a credit union. There are heaps of them out there. I only have experience of a couple of credit unions, but my experience has been good, my friends (at both MUCU and other credit unions) say the same, and surveys consistently show that credit union customers tend to be much more satisfied with the service provided than bank customers are.

I joined Melbourne University Credit Union (MUCU) about fifteen or twenty years ago, when I worked on campus. It's not a particularly flash branch. Sometimes when I walk in, I feel as though I've been transported back to the 1960s. It's kind of daggy-looking, but in a good way. Flashy isn't always better.

This credit union compares very favourably with a bank in a two significant ways. One is that its transaction account (Access Savings) has very low fees. It has no monthly account-keeping fee at all, and as long as you stay under the limits for ATM and EFTPOS transactions, you can avoid transaction fees too. Want to know how much I've paid in fees in all the years I've been with them? Zero. Not a cent. And I don't specially change my spending patterns in order to avoid the fees, either. In fact, in order to write this review, I had to go look up the MUCU website to check whether they still do have transaction limits, because I knew that whatever those limits are, they're sufficiently generous not to affect me.

I have a chequebook attached to this account as well, and a year or two ago MUCU introduced a 50c fee on each cheque. But this hasn't yet affected me either. With things such as BPay and Paypal, I hardly ever need to write a cheque these days, and 50c isn't going to break the bank if I do.

Several years ago, when I still had my credit card with one of the Big Four banks, they kept on sending me marketing material urging me to open one of their savings accounts. "Only $5 a month account-keeping fee!" their letter trumpeted. "Isn't that great? Can you beat that?" I ignored this junk mail, but it kept coming and I finally got sick of it. I scribbled a reply on the back of one of their letters. "Dear Big-Four-Bank," I wrote. "Yes, I can beat that. My credit union charges ZERO account-keeping fees. Always has. Much better than your exorbitant $5 a month, which, by the way, adds up to $60 a year and sounds like a fairly crappy deal when you say it like that. I'll stick with my zero-fee account. Can YOU beat that?" And I stuffed it into their reply-paid envelope and sent it back. Never heard from them after that.

Some people reading this may be wondering about ATM coverage. A zero-monthly-fee account is all very well, but it's not going to be so great if your savings are gobbled up by "foreign" ATM transaction fees because you can't find an ATM owned by this credit union - which, after all, is only a tiny one-branch outfit. Fear not. The ATM card is a REDI card, and the REDI network of ATMs is quite extensive. Added to that, you can use any NAB ATM free of charge as well.

The second way in which MUCU compares favourably with a bank relates to its service. In the early days of using my account, when I worked on campus, I'd often pop in to make a deposit or a withdrawal. I never, ever had to queue; MUCU still hasn't introduced central queuing because they don't need to. Usually, you'll be the only customer in there. Moreover, they always remembered me! They knew my face, so they never had to check my signature on the withdrawal slip. Do your bank's tellers recognise you when you walk in? Have they EVER been able to recognise you?

I rarely call in to MUCU now because I do most of my banking electronically, so I don't expect they'd recognise me these days, but whenever I do call in, I get the same friendly and efficient service as I've always received. And there are still no queues.

Because it's only a small institution, MUCU doesn't have every financial product that I need. For instance, it doesn't yet offer a credit card. And I've regularly checked its term deposit rates whenever I've had funds to invest, but it hasn't compared all that well with the interest rates at bigger institutions such as ING. That may change now that MUCU has recently merged with two other small credit unions (LaTrobe Uni and Pulse); with more funds behind it, it may be possible for it to become more competitive. But for an economical day-to-day transaction account, with good service thrown in, MUCU has always been competitive.

I know there's at least one better transaction account out there - ING's Orange account, which actually pays YOU when you make a withdrawal. I've been tempted to switch. But MUCU and I have been together for a long time, and I still feel loyal towards them. About the only thing they could do to lose that loyalty would be to introduce a monthly account-keeping fee. But as long as the account conditions remain much the same, then I'll probably stay with them until I die, and you'll have to claw my MUCU card out of my cold, stiff fingers to get it away from me.