Banks we track

Each profile in this directory brings together the things about an institution that are actually checkable — total assets and deposits from the Federal Reserve's large-bank release, branch count and FDIC certificate number from the FDIC's own institution directory, app ratings from the stores that publish them — alongside every account and credit card we track from that bank, each with the source and date behind its figures. Every profile also carries a written assessment: where the bank is genuinely strong, what its terms cost you when you don't fit them, and who should look elsewhere.

Reading them side by side, one trade-off dominates almost everything else in U.S. retail banking: branches or rates. The largest network in this directory runs over five thousand branches; the bank with the highest savings rate runs five. That isn't a coincidence or a failure on anyone's part — a branch network is expensive and the deposit rate is where it gets funded — but it does mean the question worth answering first is which of the two you'd actually miss.

The answer for a lot of people turns out to be neither exclusively. Nothing requires your checking account and your savings to live at the same institution, and splitting them is the standard way to get a branch you can walk into and a rate worth having at the same time.