Help choosing a bank

We are trying to find a national bank to use as our primary account, but I have no idea who to go with.

Some background:

• 1 Car Loan that we would potentially transfer
• Planning to buy a house in the next 1-3 years
• Want access to mobile deposits
• Would have both checking and savings account, but not super concerned with savings interest rates.
• Wanting a bank with a big network of physical locations (not just atms)

We currently have a local credit union and navy federal, but if we plan to move neither of those have a ton of locations, which was an issue when we bought our car.

The two most obvious choices are BoA and Wells Fargo, but does anyone have experience with these, or any other recommendations?

NOT WELLS FARGO!

Seriously.

US Bank is tolerable, but depending on the branch, lobby hours/drive up could be very limited--  of course maybe all banks are "optimizing" that these days.

I don't think it's part of your use case, but they do charge a service fee if you're a business and you exceed a certain amount in cash deposits.

PNC Bank took pretty good care of me as I dealt with the accounts from my Dad's estate, but again, may be branch dependent.

I'm not a fan of traditional big banks in general, but if you need physical locations across a large swath of land, BoA is probably the way to go. They're not the best for many things, but they got the branch coverage.

To have a national network of branches for route sales deposits, the company I work for went with Chase. 

This is not a resounding endorsement of them but they are big. 

I got my first US home loan through a small lender, who was terrible and eventually sold my loan to one of the big players in the 2008 subprime crash. I actually walked out of my first closing because the paperwork wasn't right, and then things got uglier. 

Went to Wells Fargo after that and other than a bad experience with one individual who wasn't competent, they've been very good. They've been able to offer us better terms than I've found elsewhere and once we got past the incompetent, were able to solve problems quickly. I once had to make a cash withdrawl of $3k while driving through the middle of Nebraska and it was easy to find a friendly branch to help me out.

I use Chase, but that's a holdover from when they came to my work and offered $500 to open a checking account with them. I haven't really had any complaints.

Credit Union with shared branching would be my choice. Definitely make sure they participate in shared branching

Wells Fargo paid fines of several hundred million dollars for systemically defrauding customers. They're near-certainly not the only ones who do this, but they got caught. I can't stomach rewarding that behavior with my business, especially since I don't believe the C-level people were fully replaced.

These days, it feels like we're not clients or even customers anymore, but targets - marks to be fleeced. Caveat Emptor, indeed.

Is there any reason that you want everything under one roof (or maybe I'm misunderstang part of the ask)? I've always found my best rates by shopping around. 

For example:

Bank: Bank of America (20+ years.) One checking account for spending money, one checking account for automatic mortgage/escrow/taxes payments, and a savings account.

Wife's car loan: Denton Area Teacher's Credit Union

My car loan: Capital One

Mortgage: LoanDepot

I can understand your want for a good banking network if you need to visit physical locations, but there's no need to combine all accounts to a single entity. BofA makes it easy to set up automatic recurring payments to any of my external accounts. 

BoulderG said:

Wells Fargo paid fines of several hundred million dollars for systemically defrauding customers. They're near-certainly not the only ones who do this, but they got caught. I can't stomach rewarding that behavior with my business, especially since I don't believe the C-level people were fully replaced.

These days, it feels like we're not clients or even customers anymore, but targets - marks to be fleeced. Caveat Emptor, indeed.

And that wasn't a one time occurrence. 

While I never had a consumer account with WF, my experience with them after they bought the bank that financed my practice was literally life altering. 

 

I've been using BofA for 35 years, no complaints.  No experience with Wells Fargo.

I started out with SC National, who was bought by Wachovia, who was then bought by Wells Fargo. 

I currently have several personal and business checking accounts, a personal loan, and a business line of credit with them. I have had zero issues that weren't directly my fault. They have been professional to deal with in every way. 

Edit to say the only other bank I deal with is Huntington Bank. They have also been flawless to deal with. 

I have had accounts with almost all of the national big banks, since I chased credit card and checking bonus rewards for years.  With your criteria, I'd pick Chase.  Tons of locations, fees are not too onerous, tons of credit card offers with good rewards if that sort of thing is important to you (you can get the Chase cards without a Chase account, but having an account there makes automating things easier).  Their online bill pay software is better than some of the others also.  BOA actually has a decent online payment system, I use that for my mother's accounts.

I still have a Wells Fargo account but it's probably going away soon.  I have had trouble with things like getting rid of automated bill payments (3 months and 3 trips to the branch after they kept trying to pay the city parking garage a monthly fee when I'd stopped the enrollment).

I really like the Ally accounts and their online service has been good, they pay good interest on savings, and they reimburse other banks' ATM fees, which is good for getting cash at those E36 M3ty gas station ATMs with the outrageous fees.  No physical locations tho.

All of that and I still have gone back to a Navy related credit union for most of my stuff (Vystar).  Lots of physical locations in my area, which helped when I was building a house and needed to get large amounts of cash frequently.

I vote for local credit union that is part of the Co-Op shared branch network. It made buying a house a lot easier, because I could call and email the same actual human being, who would respond same-day with stuff like updated offer letters. Their closing costs were very competitive. They also still service the mortgage and haven't sold it off, meaning I can call that same actual human being about escrow questions. They have an app that is decent for depositing checks via camera. How often are you really visiting a location anyway? I only ever go in person to pull cash for buying bad decisions. 

These days with interest rates high, we keep most of our savings in a pick-your-poison online high yield savings account. We basically just keep a minimum amount in our credit union checking to pay mortgage, credit card, and bills out of, plus some buffer just in case. Periodic transfers back into HYSA, and sometimes transfers into checking for buying bad decisions. 

I have had no bad experiences with Chase or CIBC, but CIBC's footprint is pretty small in the US. 
 

I cannot say the same for PNC, US Bank, or BoA. I have had no direct experience with Wells Fargo but enough 2nd and 3rd hand experience that I'd never ever touch them with a 10 foot pole. 
 

I am thinking about Capital One because you can essentially open up sub accounts that make it good for savings goals.