The biggest bank in America is not the best one

We scored 83 US retail banks on six things you can measure, from two federal databases that need no key, and weighted all six the same. The four largest branch networks in the country finish 41st, 48th, 60th and 71st of 83 — and not one of them is bad.

Every “best bank” list is written by somebody paid per signup. That is not a moral complaint, it is an arithmetic one: the weights are never published, so the ranking is unfalsifiable, and the winner is reliably whoever runs an affiliate programme.

So we did it the other way round. Pick the dimensions first. Weight them all equally, which is the only split that is not an opinion about what banking is for. Apply them identically to every bank, from federal data, and let the answer be whatever it turns out to be.

It turned out to be WaFd Bank of Seattle — 211 branches, nine states — and the reason why is more interesting than the name.

The ruler

Six dimensions, each one a number a federal regulator already publishes about every bank in the country.

Equal weights are a judgement, and they are the whole reason this is checkable. Any other split encodes a belief about what you want a bank for. Publishing it means you can disagree with it — and further down we run a hundred thousand other weightings to show exactly how much that disagreement would buy you.

The six were not chosen by taste either. They came out of a correlation cut over fourteen candidates: any pair correlating above about 0.5 is measuring the same thing twice and secretly double-weighting it. In the surviving six the largest absolute pairwise correlation is 0.444. Nothing here is a proxy for anything else.

Each bank is scored on its percentile rank within the 83, not its z-score. Deposits and complaint rates are violently skewed — JPMorgan Chase alone holds $2.17 trillion — and a z-score would let the biggest banks compress everybody else toward the middle. The composite is the weighted sum of the six percentiles, times 100.

Who is in the field, and who is missing

158 US banks have 50 or more domestic branches. Only 83 of them appear in the CFPB's deposit-complaint data, and only those 83 are ranked here.

The other 75 were dropped, not carried at zero. This is the single most consequential decision in the whole project, so it is worth being exact about.

So the honest description of this field is “US retail banks with a federal complaint record”, and that is what the video says out loud. It costs the series' usual floor of 100 — and 83 measured banks beat 158 with 75 of them invented.

A hole in the data is not a zero. It is a hole.

The big four are not bad. They are spiky.

Here is the result everybody expects to be an insult and is not.

Not one of them is a bad bank, and the percentiles say so plainly. Chase is the 100th percentile on reach — 49 states, more than anyone else in the country — and the 89th on capital. Bank of America is the 99th percentile on redress: when a complaint is filed against it, it is very nearly the most likely bank in America to give you something back.

Read the rows sideways and the shape is obvious. Every one of them is near the top on reach and near the bottom on complaints and branch density. They are enormous, they are everywhere, and per dollar of your money they run comparatively few branches and generate comparatively many complaints.

Wells Fargo sits in the 1st percentile for complaints — the bottom of the field on 56.2 deposit complaints per $10B per year, against 8.5 for the winner. And they all pay you almost nothing: the big four pay 1.44% to 1.67% on deposits, in the 21st to 32nd percentile.

A weighted sum of six capped percentiles is asymmetric in a way that makes this decisive. You can only ever earn 16.67 points on reach no matter how many states you reach — but you can lose all 16.67. A hole costs more than a peak pays.

The winner

69.0 out of 100. That is 1.42 points clear of Busey Bank and 2.24 standard deviations above the mean of the 83. Here is where the points came from:

Why it wins, which is not why you would guess

The obvious reading is that WaFd won on interest — 2.69% paid on deposits, 5th of 83, against 1.44% at Wells Fargo. That is a real result and it is not the mechanism.

The mechanism is the absence of a weakness.

WaFd is above the field median on five of the six dimensions, and its worst measure is the 48th percentile. No other bank in the 83 has a worst measure that clears the 44th. It is not first at anything except being never bad at anything.

That is the whole finding, and it is not a story about big banks being villains. It is a story about what a branch network is. Reach and size are the two things a giant bank is optimised for, and they are two of six columns. The other four — what it pays you, how often people complain, what happens when they do, how many branches it runs per dollar it holds — are the ones a regional bank can win, and the ones nobody puts on a billboard.

The part that argues against the answer

A ranking that only ships the result it likes is marketing. So: how much of this is the equal weighting talking?

We re-ran the entire scoring 100,000 times, with the six weights drawn uniformly at random from the simplex. The result is the honest version of the headline, and it is weaker than the headline:

Thirty-five different banks finish first under some defensible set of weights. WaFd wins more of them than anyone else and still loses seven times out of eight. The claim this dataset supports is precisely that — it wins more random weightings than any other bank — and not that the question is settled.

Weight size first and a Montana bank wins. Weight service first and it drops to ninth. Both rankings ship in the file, because the interesting thing about a ranking is where it breaks.

What is deliberately not in it

Fees. They belong in this score. They are not here, and the reason is worth stating rather than hiding: there is no federal database of retail account fees. Every “average overdraft fee” figure in circulation traces back to a survey of a few hundred institutions, and no source publishes a fee schedule keyed to an FDIC certificate number.

This is the biggest known hole in the ruler, and it is a hole rather than an omission quietly covered by something else. Nothing was substituted into the gap. The temptation to drop in a plausible-looking seventh column is exactly how a ranking of 83 real banks becomes fiction that passes every check you have.

Also absent, on purpose: app-store ratings, branch experience and customer service scores — each measurable only as somebody's index of somebody else's index. And interest paid on savings specifically: the call report gives interest expense across all domestic deposits, not per product, so a bank with many non-interest checking accounts looks worse here than its savings rate alone would suggest.

Two things that produced correct-looking output and were wrong

Both are invisible in the output, which is the only reason they are worth writing down.

1 · FDIC dollars are thousands

The call report gives JPMorgan Chase's deposits as 2,167,793,000, and that is $2.17 trillion. An early draft of the end card printed it with a thousands separator and a dollar sign, understating every bank in the project by a factor of a thousand. Nothing errors. The number is real, the formatting is normal, and the figure is off by 1,000×.

2 · A logo matcher that agreed too easily

The opening map needed a mark for every bank that leads a state, which meant fetching logos for banks outside the scored 83 for the first time. “Bank of Hawaii” immediately resolved to Hawaii National Bank — a different, real bank in the same state. Both names are plausible, both institutions exist, and the wrong mark would have sat on Hawaii looking entirely normal to everyone including us. Pinned by hand now.

The map at the start

The video opens on every state filled with the mark of the bank that state banks with, from the FDIC Summary of Deposits 2025 — 76,097 branch records. It is a separate calculation and is not part of the ranking.

It also contains the one methodological trap worth copying. Raw deposit market share, which is the standard published measure, gives Massachusetts to State Street — a custody bank with 34.5% of the state's deposits and essentially no retail customers. It gives South Dakota to Citibank (a credit-card charter), Utah to Morgan Stanley, and Iowa to Principal Bank on a 6.6% share.

None of those is the bank those states bank with. They are deposit-booking artifacts: a charter can book deposits in a state it does not retail in. Requiring the leader to actually run five or more branches in the state fixes every one of them — Massachusetts becomes Bank of America, over 148 branches — and the answer is stable whether the threshold is 5 or 10, so it is not a number tuned to produce a result.

That leaves 21 distinct banks leading the 50 states and DC. Bank of America leads 12 of them, JPMorgan Chase 8, U.S. Bank 6.

The weights are a judgement. They are published so you can disagree with them, and the file below has every raw value and every per-dimension percentile in it, so disagreeing is a spreadsheet exercise rather than an argument.