Most multi-national banks have a hard time with 'world-wide' scale and prefer to cordon off geo-markets behind local corps, going so far as to have separate C-level management. Imagine how hard it is to get financial level integration?
In this day and age those layers, that lack of true inner-corp transparency, and integration is what will kill these 'traditional' enterprises.
My wife and I have our personal and joint accounts there. I hardly ever use my debit card (nobody should! Debit cards are, in general, awful. Credit cards give you actual protection and far more perks). What I care about in my bank is that I can easily connect everything with my wife, that I can easily do bill pay, and that I have full-service ATMs and iPhone apps that include deposit features.
But if I was 20 again and had far simpler banking needs, I think I'd use Simple.
Oh, another thing is, when it comes time for a mortgage or other installment loan, it's sometimes beneficial to have my money at the same institution. If we decided to dump BofA I can see us moving to a credit union (Alliant is great, for example), but as Simple isn't a full-service bank I'd have to pass on it.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20111208006460/en/Gree...
I'm serious. Google's data mining ability is unparalleled. Buy a bank, become Google Bank, and start lending. I believe Google's investment/risk analysis would be far superior to any existing bank out there.
That said, everything they offer I get at my current bank, which has been following the same strategy for over a decade now; almost no branch offices, a stellar internet bank, an even more stellar mobile app, and no weird fees at all. I pay ~$30 a year, and only because my debit card is a VISA card as well.
To me, it's hilarious to read about all the breathless Valley startups doing "amazing products" for personal finance that will "revolutionize" whatever. I haven't yet seen anything that my boring old bank doesn't already do. In addition to everything I listed above, all my purchases are automatically categorized, all my income and deposits are automatically categorized, and my bank automatically generates pretty Web2.0 pages and diagrams where I can slice and dice my personal finance as I wish, or export everything to Excel spreadsheets or whatever.
But then again, I'm not in the US, and my bank isn't a US bank, so to those living in the Valley bubble, the bank I'm using simply doesn't exist, and only the stuff made in the Valley is exciting and awesome, despite there being superior products made long ago, elsewhere.
Of course, there are also probably a lot of products that are outside of my spheres, which blow whatever solution I'm using completely out of the water, but I'm just blissfully unaware, because it's in some country I don't have dealings with or know anything about, but I sure wish some ideas would spread faster and wider than they do. :-/