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When I was 20 years old, I took everything I had and moved to New York City. I was unemployed and squatting at a friend's place. On my birthday, my grandmother mailed me a check for $100, and I realized I'd need a bank account to cash it. So I went to Washington Mutual, opened an account, and deposited my check.
Then the clerk asked if I wanted a credit card. I told him I was unemployed. He said that was fine, and they'd just give me a "starter" card with a low limit.
So that's how WaMu effectively gave me $1,000 for opening a checking account and all I had to do was not answer my phone for about a decade.
There's a fascinating piece of banking history embedded here, since for a fairly long time, the economics of USA banking meant that long-term banking relationships generated the most revenue for the bank. So they would go out of their way to establish new relationships that would hopefully endure for decades, thus keeping the bank in business. This applies even if a small percentage of those attempts would be losses, because the average was still mostly upsides.
Today, the banking landscape is much more transactional, where lots of people have no qualms jumping ship to an online bank. Sure, not everyone will go through that inconvenience, but enough will that it upsets the prior calculus that prioritized long-term relationships to achieve long-term value. That of course means that there's less upside to extending a $1k unprotected credit line and all the same downsides. Hence, credit issuers are more stingy now than in the past.
The obvious problem that this exacerbates is that people who never had access to banking have poorer chances of ever getting served once they do need banking services, because that first account needs to meet strict credit approval requirements or whatever. The very fact that a steady 4.5% of American households can't meet the bank minimum balance requirements, while "non bank" services like payday loans and buy-now-pay-later are on the rise, is a reminder that opportunities from yesteryear are disappearing rapidly, concentrating to those that already have plenty of opportunity.
Past institutions and past people did what made sense at the time, but it's quite clear that in the present, the situation is not serving the people's needs. The corporate desire to grow bank market share or shareholder value is precisely the opposite of what sustainable banks should be doing: right-sizing their scope to match what their clientele can afford. If a bank can only stay in business by having a $1500 minimum monthly balance, then they should close and a smaller, nimbler bank or credit union that only needs $400 to be sustainable should take their place. Banks grew to match the needs of the public. If the public's needs have changed, so must they.