National Benefit Services Reviews 3

No contact telephone number. No proper email address. When finally reached a person, the wrong email address was given (on purpose). The claim sent to that email address is still somewhere in orbit. It is one of these companies that absolutely do not want to pay out and dodges all kinds of requests. You want to put in a claim or ask for help: GOOD LUCK !! Sign of the times 2025 and onward.

NBS services my 403(b) ... miserably. Most distribution requests are an adventure, requiring calls for updates and wholesale starting over from scratch. One time, they processed a request within one week. One time. Others required multiple follow-ups. On one, they modified the form I submitted so that it was rejected by the 403(b) company. I joined the chorus of retirees from my district complaining about NBS, and my district assures me they're moving to a different service agency next year.

Nothing but problems from them. Bounced *incoming* payments (you read that right), high minimums to begin investing, weird account fees, over-aggressive “controls” on the debit card (i.e. treating the user as incompetent to make HSA-eligible purchases at any merchant other than their affiliate “HSA Store” 🙄), and when doing billpay they falsely “debit” your account before the payment is even delivered, to deprive you even of the (puny) interest on the float while waiting for the recipient to cash it.

EDIT: apparently the reason the billpay failed is that they didn't send a check, cashier's check, money order, EFT, or any other industry standard acceptable payment method; instead, they sent my provider an in-house GIFT CARD with a set of convoluted instructions on how it might be redeemed for cash. 🤪 I was not warned of this during the billpay process.

Thankfully, my employer has some sense and will be ditching them in 2025. If you’re an individual free to choose your HSA provider, please just choose anyone else.