Because BoA sees no benefit from giving a competitive interest rate to people with little money. Anyone with decent savings will have a Merrill account (owned by Bank of America), where they can get an FDIC insured savings rate of 4.92% in “Preferred Deposit”, or 5.2% in TTTXX, which are US treasuries, so also exempt from state and local income taxes.

https://olui2.fs.ml.com/Publish/Content/application/pdf/GWMO...

Preferred Deposit has a minimum balance of $100k: https://www.ml.com/solutions/preferred-deposit.html

(which might be fine, but most HYSAs don't have that.)

It’s minimum $100k to open it, but you can draw down all the way to $1 after that and increase or decrease any time you want. I presume if you withdraw all the money, then it closes and you need $100k to open it again, but I just leave mine at a few dollars.

But that gets back to my point that BoA does not want to pay interest to people with less than $100k cash.

$100k is a decent approximation of "just about enough for BofA to consider caring about your retaining your custom", yeah.

I’m sure they’ll eventually fix the sign mistake there…