There is a large set of infrequently encountered (for most) but often highly important and/or time-sensitive things that having a traditional bank you can walk into makes much easier.
Consider: medallion signature guarantee, initiating an arbitrarily large sized wire to an arbitrary recipient, cashing a physical check where the payee and indorsement doesn't match automatic remote-deposit scrutiny, cashing a particularly large cashier's check, getting cash above an ATM withdrawal limit (even from another bank or in another country, in some cases), working around a stated policy, etc.
Online-only, mobile-only, and neo-banks basically say "eh" to these corner-case services. But a branch manager, even if they may not personally recognize you, will have surprising leeway and willingness to solve problems if they look at the CRM and see you're a longtime customer in good standing with some modicum of deposit / activity over time. Not so for a rando.
It's been very worth my while to forego a couple % in interest income for the annual "need an institution to help me fix this today" tax.
(But yeah, keep the corpus in something that will pay you.)
I completely agree about the features of brick and mortar banks. My complaint specifically is about letting the large chain banks dominate your view. For example, BoA seemingly has the gall to charge a monthly fee on a savings account.
I'm lucky to have a competitive market for local banks that hasn't (yet) been completely borgified, and I do keep an account / safe deposit box [0] at one and use them for many of the things you mentioned. If you don't have any independent banks around, there is the common advice to look for credit unions instead.
I actually do keep an account at BoA too. It's the only link to another account that would be a huge hassle change out. Their ATM network is nice, the automated cash deposit feature on their ATMs is one of the easier ways to get available funds into the banking system on short notice, and I can stand keeping the $2k minimum balance for now. But still, they've got to be kept on a short leash.
[0] It's an inexpensive place to store external hard drives for rotating backups.
Consider: medallion signature guarantee, initiating an arbitrarily large sized wire to an arbitrary recipient, cashing a physical check where the payee and indorsement doesn't match automatic remote-deposit scrutiny, cashing a particularly large cashier's check, getting cash above an ATM withdrawal limit (even from another bank or in another country, in some cases), working around a stated policy, etc.
Online-only, mobile-only, and neo-banks basically say "eh" to these corner-case services. But a branch manager, even if they may not personally recognize you, will have surprising leeway and willingness to solve problems if they look at the CRM and see you're a longtime customer in good standing with some modicum of deposit / activity over time. Not so for a rando.
It's been very worth my while to forego a couple % in interest income for the annual "need an institution to help me fix this today" tax.
(But yeah, keep the corpus in something that will pay you.)