The only catch may be that nobody has come along and given actual competition to banks until now.
Most here may be too young to remember, but savings accounts used to provide some pretty serious interest. Banks used to compete on it. I had a savings account as a kid with a 7% interest rate on it. Banks competed on this because they needed depositors for their other activities.
Then everything got deregulated and banks no longer needed many depositors to back up their shady investments and such. The floor fell out of savings account interest rates after that.
All it takes is someone new to come along and want to compete on this. 4% is not a gift. It’s nowhere close to where savings accounts were in the 1980s. It’s a reasonable competitive challenge today.
