Goldman Sachs is doing something that would have been unthinkable before 2008

In business, whenever I select vendors I consider their motives and not their promises: What will they be motivated to do for me? Am I a big enough account to matter to them?

In this case, the motives I can imagine are marketing (make their brand more familiar to people outside Wall St, give people some personal connection to them, and have a political claim to serving more than Wall St) or meeting some regulatory requirements (as described in the article). But who knows; maybe there is more money in small depositors than I think.