How Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America Shape the Way You Save — Without You Noticing

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24-Hour Access Through Apps and Mobile Banking Budget Tools and Spending Trackers Keep Tabs for You Features Make Consistent Saving Easy It All Comes Back to Security — and the Banks Have Kept Up With the Times

On June 16, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the legislation that created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the entity charged with insuring bank deposits. The moment rebuilt something that the Great Depression had annihilated — public trust in the banking system.

The guiding hand of the FDIC meant that now, your money was safe whether the bank was robbed, burned down or failed outright, like so many had over the years as customers watched their life savings evaporate in an instant.

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The caricature of old-timers hiding their money under the mattress because they still didn’t trust banks was born. Ninety years later, big banks like Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America are giant, global institutions that have integrated their services into every aspect of our financial lives — and they steer your saving habits quietly in the background, whether you realize it or not.

Here’s how.

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24-Hour Access Through Apps and Mobile Banking

According to Home Pride Bank, roughly nine out of 10 people — 89% — use mobile banking apps as part of their daily lives. Americans are glued to their screens, and big banks have placed themselves front and center on their phones, laptops and tablets.

Real-time monitoring, updates, alerts and notifications make it impossible to tune out, which keeps people conscious of their cash, spending and saving, even if it happens subconsciously.

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Budget Tools and Spending Trackers Keep Tabs for You

Keeping track of the money coming in and going out used to be a tedious chore that was beyond the capacity of anyone who didn’t have the hours, diligence and head for numbers to balance checkbooks, comb through monthly statements and scour savings passbooks for accuracy.

Today, tools like automated expense trackers and category-based spending and budgeting features — which all the big banks include for free, complete with easy-to-read graphs and charts — do the heavy lifting for you and reveal at a glance precisely where you can cut spending and boost savings.

Features Make Consistent Saving Easy

Bank of America profiles its list of free tools that make it simple to save consistently, and consistency is the key to long-term wealth-building.

It’s not just BOA. Every major bank boasts a similar menu of offerings, including:

Automatic transfers put your savings on a schedule.
Split direct deposit makes sure you pay yourself first.
Rounding-up programs — BOA’s is called Keep the Change — let you save passively with every purchase.
Buckets let you compartmentalize your savings to work toward different goals in the same account.
Savings calculators help you crunch the numbers and develop realistic timelines for your savings goals.

It All Comes Back to Security — and the Banks Have Kept Up With the Times

FDR didn’t have to worry about server hacking, ransomware and digital identity theft, so insured deposits were enough to regain the public’s trust in the system. Modern banking customers, however, face all those threats and more every time they log on.

In response, today’s big banks have done what the Banking Act of 1933 did during the Depression — incentivized deposits through reassurance that your money in the bank is secure, introducing safeguards like: