This is a guest post by Ryan Glover, a devoted Thrive user as well as personal finance blogger. We asked him to share his extensive research conducted in order to find the “ultimate” savings account. If you enjoy this post, we hope you’ll go read his blog: Think, Plan, Save!

It’s Saturday morning, I jump on my laptop to check my finances (I do this daily), log on to Yodlee to see what has changed in my financial world, but something’s wrong. Today is different.

As I reviewed my finances I noticed that my main bank, ING Direct, was not updating. This may not sound like a big deal, however ING was MY bank. I had everything there: Orange Mortgage, Electric Orange Checking, Orange Savings, Orange CD, hell I was even using Sharebuilder. I was as Orange as they come! I was drinking the Orange Kool-Aid! Sure ING’s rates had gone down, but their support was top notch and I could sync up all my data with Thrive and Yodlee.

That was until this fated Saturday morning. I knew that ING only synced with these services during certain hours during the week, but now it was completely failing – and this was a Saturday! I called ING and was politely informed by them that I could no longer aggregate my ING data, that they no longer supported this function. What!? I’ve been a long-time customer (and user of aggregators), part of the Orange family for almost eight years and never had this problem before. Now I had a problem and that problem was not going to go away. I tried and tried to get ING to at least listen, but this was now something I had to live or deal with. Now with every problem there comes a challenge and a resolution, the challenge that was posed to me that day was “Find THE bank!”

Project: Finding THE Bank

I’ve loved and stuck with ING for over a decade for several reasons:

• Their bill pay is solid. You can pay anyone, anywhere, anytime! Electronic payments clear and post to the payee automatically.
• If you were to call ING, I’d bet that you’d get a real person in under one minute. That is one great thing about ING and what really kept me there for almost eight years.
• There are no maintenance fees for any ING bank accounts. Sharebuilder has varying fees, depending on your account plan.
• And signing up for an account is quick and easy.

The new bank had to be comparable to ING and support aggregation to PFM sites, which became a missing piece of the ING puzzle.

Important note: If you are in a marriage (and have joint checking), this is where you need to make sure you gather input from your spouse. In this case, this is my account, I told my wife, “I’m moving away from ING”, her response was a simple, “Ok, I trust you”. Game on!

Phase I: Gathering Requirements for THE Bank

My requirements for THE Bank:

• Must support aggregation to PFM (Thrive, Yodlee, etc)
• Must have checking, savings, and brokerage accounts
• Must have online bill pay
• Must support online transfers between accounts both internal and external
• Must have at least average interest rates for savings account
• Must have a support number that gets me to a human being
• Low to no fees
• Interest rates must not require any additional manual transactions in order to attain rate.
  Example: Make 15 signature based debit card transactions a month

Phase II: Assessing Banks

Those are my requirements. Your requirements will be totally different than what I have, and I would expect that. The key is really understanding what you are looking for in a bank. Based off my requirements above, many banks and brokerages are removed from consideration immediately. I was left with two choices:

E*Trade VS Charles Schwab

Phase III: Testing Banks
Below is a breakdown of how each bank fared in tests based on my requirements:

Must support aggregation to PFM
E*Trade: I have been able add my test E*Trade account to all aggregators without issue.
Charles Schwab: I have been able add my test Charles Schwab account to all aggregators without issue.

Must have checking, savings, and brokerage accounts
E*Trade: E*Trade meets all of the requirements. I was able to setup a brokerage, checking, savings, and IRA account in minutes.
Charles Schwab: Schwab meets all of the requirements. I was able to setup a brokerage and high-yield checking account at the same time. For some reason, the creation of the savings account is not available online!?!

Must have online bill pay
E*Trade: E*Trade’s bill pay was very easy to setup, however my main concern with it was delivery time. I setup a payee that I know accepts ebills and normally posts same day, however with E*Trade there was a five day lead time for payment. I never actually sent a payment via E*Trade, so this estimated time may not be 100% accurate.
Charles Schwab: Schwab uses Checkfree for online bill pay. Having previously used MyCheckfree.com for e-pay, I know that this service is extremely fast and has a large pool of billers that are supported.

Must support online transfers between accounts both internal and external
The transfer service for both banks is on par with industry standard.

Must have at least average interest rates for savings account
Both banks have interest rates above those of the nation average.

* on balances over $5000. Rate is .05% on balances below $5000

Must have a support number that gets me to a human being
E*Trade: I have called E*Trade a few times to test out their support. Each time I have not been on hold for longer than a minute. E*Trade also has a “Chat Now” capability. During these session the rep cannot discuss your account, however they can call you to discuss further after the initial chat.
E*Trade Support: 1-800-387-2331
Charles Schwab: I couldn’t believe the level of support I initially received from Charles Schwab. I thought I got lucky and was routed to the A team that was working in the afternoon. So as part of my test, I decided to call CS support at 10:40PM CST. To my surprise, the support was outstanding! I spoke with this rep for a good 15 minutes or so discussing short-term and long-term strategies.
Charles Schwab Brokerage Support: 1-800-435-4000
Charles Schwab Bank Support: 1-888-403-9000

Low to no fees
E*Trade: E*Trade has some fees that could be assessed against your bank and brokerage account depending on total assets. To view all fees pertaining to all E*Trade accounts, click here.
Charles Schwab: Charles Schwab has no account minimums or service fees for their banking arm. The one trading fee that does seem a bit extreme is the mutual fund transaction fee, which is $49.99. This is not for all funds, however one fund I was contemplating for a part of my EF would have cost me $49.99 per transaction, even with an automatic investment plan setup. That being said, CS does have many funds with no transaction fees that are comparable to the fund I was considering. To view all fees pertaining to all Charles Schwab accounts, click here.

Phase IV: Implement and Migrate

After reviewing my test results and reading up on the banks, I am moving everything to Charles Schwab. I was leaning towards E*Trade, but a few little things (support and bill pay), made me move over towards Chuck. Now all I need to do it Migrate!

Your requirements may be different than mine, but the process should be somewhat similar. I know, for instance, many friends and colleagues require a physical location near their house. I never go to the bank, so that is nowhere near a requirement for me. Others are rate chasers and are looking out for that bank with the highest rates. That being said, I hope you get some use out of this process I have laid out.