NPR. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darren Woods.

And I'm Whelan Wong. Back in 2022, Rebecca Souden spotted an ad for a bank.

The bank was touting its higher than average interest rate for savings accounts.

And I thought to myself, I thought all bank accounts were supposed to have like the same interest.

I thought that was kind of the point of a bank account.

Rebecca was just a few years out of college and she had a savings account at a major bank

that was paying her just 0.01% interest. This other bank was offering an annual percentage yield or an

APY of over 4% interest. So Rebecca opened a new high-yield savings account with

this other bank and she kept shopping around.

She has documented her personal finance experiences

on Tik-Toc, where she has over 90,000 followers.

If I'm going to open a new account right now, I would not go anywhere with less than a 4% APY.

Now you might think that with customers like Rebecca jumping to high-yield savings account,

the biggest marquee named banks would be aggressively

upping their rates to attract more deposits. But the average national rate for

savings account right now is just 0.45%. And this rate has barely budged even though the Federal

Reserve has raised interest rates to their highest level in over two decades. So

do big banks even care about their savings account customers anymore?

Well, it depends who you are. Today on the show, why Big Banks aren't that interested

in paying you interest on your plain vanilla savings account. this podcast and the following message come from Wise, the app that makes managing your money

in different currencies easy. With Wise, you can send and spend money internationally at the

mid-market exchange rate,

...