I use BofA, too. They bought out Fleet a few years ago, and Fleet gobbled up Nat West back in the mid-1990s. My local BofA was a Nat West bank back in the 1980s.
Over the years, especially in the Fleet years, the bank gradually made some of its privileges more costly or took them away. NW had a drive-up teller which got replaced by a drive-up ATM after Fleet took over. NW had a linked MM savings account which could be used to get free checking, in effect giving me an interest-bearing checking account with a pretty low minimum balance ($1,500). But that disappeared when Fleet took over, forcing me to merge the two accounts and lose the $7 per month I had been earning, in effect a monthly fee.
Fleet (and its competitors) also began charging ATM fees to use other bank's ATMs, a practice which accelerated greatly in the 1990s. So I had fewer ATMs to choose from. Thankfully, Fleet was gobbling up lots of smaller, local banks so their ATM network expanded, not only here but near my former (yay) office in Jersey CIty, New Jersey.
Fleet began to increase its minimum daily balance to avoid monthly checking account fees. They also converted from an average daily balance to a minimum daily balance, the latter being in effect higher than the former because you could not slip below the minimum for even one day without getting hit with the fee.
Surprisingly, after BofA took over for Fleet, the minimum daily balances dropped although a recent increase has pretty much done away with that. However, BofA has a MyAccess checking account which allows free checking if you have a direct deposit every month, something Fleet did not have IIRC.
But BofA (and other banks, probably) stopped returning canceled checks with their monthly statements a few years ago, replacing them with check images. However, BofA starting next January will begin charging us for those images in the statements. We can sign up for online banking to view and print those images at no charge, so I will probably have to do that, reluctantly.
At least BofA doesn't charge me for using their tellers who are usually idle when I go in there at 11 AM on a typical weekday once a month. And their own ATMs are free to use and they finally added an express feature for preset $$ withdrawals Fleet had. (It took them a few years to get that done here in NY; they had it done in NJ earlier when I was still working there.)
I have electronic auto-payments as I had with NW and Fleet as well as direct deposits, pretty standard stuff at no charge. I don't care about their CD rates or loans or IRAs because I am debt-free and invest elsewhere. If I happen to use my debit card once in a while to buy something, I don't get charged for it.
So I get from BofA what I need to get from them for my everyday banking purposes. They are the hub of my day-to-day transactions but I leave just enough with them to avoid fees. BofA has made this a little more difficult with their latest round of changes (canceled checks) but I still hang in there with them.
