Arca — built to help people grow their savings.

Why I built Arca.

Like most people, I don’t sit and watch my savings APY change. So when my bank quietly cut the rate from 4% to 0.01% over the course of a few months, it slipped right past me. Eventually I went looking and found an online bank paying around 4% APY with no fees, no minimum balance, and no promotional asterisk.

The frustrating part wasn’t the rate cut. It was that there was no neutral place to see when rates change, what each bank is paying right now, or what the gap was costing me. I’d spent seven years at Citibank, and even I couldn’t easily figure out where to look. Arca is the tool I wished I’d had: a free, dated comparison of high-yield savings accounts, with a running history of rate changes so the next cut doesn’t slip past you. People work hard to earn their money — when it lands in a savings account, that money should work too.

Why finding a good savings account feels so hard.

Big banks bet on inertia, and the math behind that bet is brutal. Chase’s standard savings account pays 0.01% APY as of September 24, 2026. The other big banks — Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and U.S. Bank — are all in roughly the same neighborhood. And that’s where most of the country’s savings actually sit: per original research from Apiture and The Harris Poll of more than 2,000 U.S. consumers, 79% of Gen Z and 69% of millennials have chosen a large bank as their primary financial institution. You can see the breakdown account by account: Chase savings rate vs. high-yield, Bank of America savings rate, Wells Fargo savings rate, U.S. Bank savings rate — or read the longer analysis in Big Bank vs. High-Yield Savings 2026.

The goal isn’t to dunk on any one bank. The goal is to make the gap visible — in dollars, not percentages — and to keep it visible over time. Most people don’t know what their savings APY is today, when it last changed, or what the gap is costing them this month. Arca exists to answer all three — and to publish the answer: the Arca Savings Index tracks that gap every week, free for anyone to reuse with credit.

“Savings shouldn’t require a research project. The math is plain — we just had to put it somewhere you could see it.”

How Arca stays honest.

Three commitments:

1. 1Affiliate compensation never changes our ranking. If we earn a commission when a reader opens an account through one of our links, that commission has no effect on whether or where a bank appears.
2. 2Conditions live inline. Minimum balance, monthly fee, and direct-deposit requirements are shown in the row, not in a footnote.
3. 3Everything we know is on the page. If there’s a caveat to a rate or a fee that matters, our goal is to surface it upfront, not bury it.

How we check rates. Every rate on Arca is captured from the bank’s own public rate page and re-checked against it every week. A changed rate or condition is reviewed before it is published.