Free Credit Union Checking Account

Tap to Pay cards let you make pay­ments with­out run­ning your card through a ter­mi­nal. It’s a touch-free pay­ment method; you sim­ply hold the card with­in 2 inch­es of the Contactless/Tap to Pay sym­bol on the ter­mi­nal (in oth­er words, you don’t have to lit­er­al­ly tap the card against any­thing). In some cas­es, it may take a sec­ond or two for the trans­ac­tion to com­plete, so don’t pull the card away too quick­ly. To indi­cate when the trans­ac­tion is com­plete, the pay­ment ter­mi­nal may beep, dis­play a green check­mark, or flash a green light.

Tap to Pay cards are as secure as EMV chip cards because they both use the same secu­ri­ty stan­dards for trans­ac­tions. Whether you’re using a Tap to Pay card or insert­ing your EMV chip card, the sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion sent is encrypted.

You’ll see a Contactless/Tap to Pay Sym­bol, either on the ter­mi­nal or dis­played promi­nent­ly by the mer­chant. It looks some­thing like a Wi-Fi sym­bol (three or four con­cen­tric arcs of dif­fer­ent sizes) turned sideways. 

Tech­ni­cal­ly, you use a Tap to Pay card that is embed­ded with a Con­tact­less chip. How­ev­er, the terms Tap to Pay and Con­tact­less are basi­cal­ly interchangeable.

You’ll still have the option to swipe the card for a magstripe read or dip it in an EMV chip read­er. You’re not los­ing any options, just gain­ing the con­tact­less option.

When you receive a new deb­it or cred­it card, it will include an acti­va­tion stick­er with instruc­tions for acti­vat­ing your card via the phone. You can also instant­ly acti­vate the card using the Card Man­age­ment fea­ture in Online & Mobile Banking. 

You’ll find your check­ing account num­ber on the bot­tom of your checks. If you don’t have your checks with you, you can find it in Online Bank­ing. From the Online Bank­ing Dash­board, click on your check­ing account. This opens a sep­a­rate pan­el that shows your recent trans­ac­tion his­to­ry.  At the top of the list of trans­ac­tions, you will see a link that says Account Details. Click on this link, and the dis­played infor­ma­tion will change. The account num­ber for a check­ing account is a four­teen-dig­it num­ber, list­ed as the “MICR Account Number”.

Exam­ple

The rout­ing num­ber is iden­ti­cal for all SF Fire Cred­it Union accounts: 321076506. You can find the rout­ing num­ber dis­played in the bot­tom right hand cor­ner of most pages with­in Online Bank­ing. You’ll also find it in the teal box that appears at the bot­tom of many pages on this pub­lic website.

Yes.

1. From the menu in Online Bank­ing or the Mobile Bank­ing app, click on New Accounts and Loans and then select Open New Accounts. 
2. Click “Apply Here” on the Check­ing, Sav­ings and Cer­tifi­cates tile. 
3. If you have more than one Mem­ber ID # asso­ci­at­ed with your Social Secu­ri­ty Num­ber or Tax Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion Num­ber, you’ll have the chance to choose which one should be asso­ci­at­ed with the new account. 
4. A pan­el will open to the right to let you choose between three cat­e­gories: Term Cer­tifi­cates, Check­ing and Sav­ings accounts, or a new membership. 
5. Choose the cat­e­go­ry and then the account type you wish to open, and fol­low the on-screen prompts. 

Term Cer­tifi­cates will require a min­i­mum $250 deposit from an avail­able fund­ing source. If you do not have funds avail­able in an account at SF Fire Cred­it Union, you will not be able to open a Term Cer­tifi­cate online until you make a deposit or trans­fer funds in from an exter­nal account using Trans­fer & Pay » Make a Transfer.

There are a few steps to take to help make sure your Mobile Deposit goes through.

• Make sure to endorse the check on the back (include your name, mem­ber num­ber, and “For mobile deposit only to SF Fire Cred­it Union”)
• Make sure you have suf­fi­cient light­ing where you are tak­ing the picture
• Make sure the sig­na­ture on the front of the check does not obscure the account details
• Make sure the check fits with­in the frame on the screen when tak­ing the photo
• Once you receive a Mobile Deposit #, please record on the back of the check and retain the check for two weeks.

If you get an error when try­ing to launch the cam­era, check the Pri­va­cy set­tings for the cam­era on your device. You may need to give the SF Fire CU Mobile App per­mis­sion to access the camera.

You can load a trav­el note for either domes­tic or inter­na­tion­al trav­el using the Card Man­age­ment fea­ture with­in Online & Mobile Bank­ing. You will first need to spec­i­fy a pre­ferred con­tact phone num­ber, which can be done under Profile>Contact Information.

You can also load a trav­el note by call­ing us, vis­it­ing the branch, or con­tact­ing us via live chat.