Source: Quartz
Bankrate’s systematization of bank selection—breaking it into seven discrete steps rather than leaving it to gut feel or default inheritance—shows a market finally admitting that deposit banking has become genuinely hard to comparison-shop. The real shift isn’t that banks have fees; it’s that fee structures have fragmented so thoroughly (overdraft policies, minimum balances, digital-only discounts, regional quirks) that even financially literate consumers need a decision framework, which means banks have lost the stickiness that once came from inertia alone. This guide essentially is a rebuttal to that stickiness—it’s a commercial publisher saying the switching costs are now low enough that your bank should have to earn your business every quarter.