TCF Financial Corporation Chairman and CEO William A. Cooper said Thursday that the Wayzata-based bank will begin to charge a monthly fee on checking accounts because of new federal rules that will curb overdraft fees.

TCF helped pioneer free checking accounts as a competitive marketing position two decades ago.

Cooper made the comments in a conference call with industry analysts.

“TCF believes that [the new federal] rules are not in the best interest of our customers . . . we want our customers to be able to rely on their debit card and not to have that [card] rejected even when, by the end of the day, they would have good funds in their account,” Cooper said according to a transcript.

Currently, the industry standard permits consumers to overdraw their checking account, but they are often automatically assed an overdraft fee.

Under the new proposed rules—which would go into effect in July—banks would not be allowed to automatically charge customers a fee when they overdraw their account. As a result, banks say they would reject transactions when customers have insufficient funds in their accounts.

“We think it’s a poorly thought out rule,” Cooper said.

Commercial banks together derive billions in revenue from overdraft fees annually.

The government estimates that about 6 percent of commercial bank revenue is generated from overdrafts and similar fees.

Cooper said that TCF hopes that the new monthly checking account fee will bring in the same amount of revenue that overdraft fees did. Cooper also said that the bank will let customers opt in to an overdraft protection program, which will allow customers to overdraw their accounts.

Last fall, several of the nation’s largest commercial banks, including Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank, NA, changed their overdraft-fee policies. U.S. Bank said that it will cap the number of overdraft fees to three per day and won’t charge customers who overdraw their account by less than $10.

On Thursday, TCF reported that its fourth-quarter net income declined 30 percent to $19.5 million from the same period last year.

TCF is one of Minnsota’s 35 largest public companies based on annual revenue, which totaled $1.2 billion in 2009.