There is a large set of infrequently encountered (for most) but often highly important and/or time-sensitive things that having a traditional bank you can walk into makes
much easier.
Consider: medallion signature guarantee, initiating an arbitrarily large sized wire to an arbitrary recipient, cashing a physical check where the payee and indorsement doesn't match automatic remote-deposit scrutiny, cashing a particularly large cashier's check, getting cash above an ATM withdrawal limit (even from another bank or in another country, in some cases), working around a stated policy, etc.
Online-only, mobile-only, and neo-banks basically say "eh" to these corner-case services. But a branch manager, even if they may not personally recognize you, will have surprising leeway and willingness to solve problems if they look at the CRM and see you're a longtime customer in good standing with some modicum of deposit / activity over time. Not so for a rando.
It's been very worth my while to forego a couple % in interest income for the annual "need an institution to help me fix this today" tax.
(But yeah, keep the corpus in something that will pay you.)
Consider: medallion signature guarantee, initiating an arbitrarily large sized wire to an arbitrary recipient, cashing a physical check where the payee and indorsement doesn't match automatic remote-deposit scrutiny, cashing a particularly large cashier's check, getting cash above an ATM withdrawal limit (even from another bank or in another country, in some cases), working around a stated policy, etc.
Online-only, mobile-only, and neo-banks basically say "eh" to these corner-case services. But a branch manager, even if they may not personally recognize you, will have surprising leeway and willingness to solve problems if they look at the CRM and see you're a longtime customer in good standing with some modicum of deposit / activity over time. Not so for a rando.
It's been very worth my while to forego a couple % in interest income for the annual "need an institution to help me fix this today" tax.
(But yeah, keep the corpus in something that will pay you.)