I never got why people choose citi. They don’t offer best lending rates, they don’t have a vast ATM network, their credit card benefits are worse than chase/amex, etc. seems they aren’t really amazing at any particular segment but meh in all.
Other brokerages do the same sorts of things, Fidelity isn't alone in this. Schwab went a different way and decided to just buy a bank. Instead of like the BOA/Chase versions, where they bought a brokerage.
But even if it was $100k savings, you can get ~5% APY at BoA high yield savings through Merrill anyways. I don't recommend that since Fidelity works better for that type of account, but you could do it.
All three feature an investment bank, a commercial bank and an asset manager. There are a number of smaller operations which have all three but none at the scale of those three. Wells is much smaller, and HSBC isn’t a US bank. Goldman and Morgan Stanley don’t really have a commercial banks and neither do the mega sized asset managers like Blackrock.
So the thing is Citi isn’t really a bad commercial bank and is really useful for corporate treasury services if you’re a large multinational company. Their international footprint is huge and fit a lot of use cases it’s either them or HSBC.
The problem is the IB and AM are ‘meh’ and hugely inefficient. It’s not like they do such a terrible job from a customer perspective. From an investor perspective it just costs so much to do it.