Well, I don't know about the state where you live, but here in California, BofA gives you the ability to tie accounts together for making minimums ("Prima" account it's called here).
I have tied my wife's and my checking and savings accounts, along with my brother's and my checking account we use for property we inherited from our parents, plus my IRA (with Merrill-Lynch), and a couple other things. Between the total of the accounts, we are well over the minimum to pay any fees.
If you read the original article, it's the tying of the accounts to get minimums that are also being pushed in Massachusetts. Trust me, demand deposit accounts (totally liquid accounts like checking and savings where you can take your money out "on demand") are loss leaders for the banks. Even more so now between the low interest rates on money and the government's curtailing of fees that can be charged.
My point was that the banks (BofA is not alone) is in the same position with checking accounts that they were back in the 90s when the "Fair Housing Act" said you had to give a loan to anyone who could fog a mirror, regardless of whether they had the means to pay it back. How else do you explain my friend's retired father getting a $450,000 mortgage on a house in Stockton, CA a few years ago?
I was with BofA when I lived in CA too, and was happy with the arrangement. When I moved to WA, I switched to WaMu after BofA screwed things up (failed to pay interest on several accounts for months, then refused to correct the situation... it amounted to a sizeable amount of money lost).
Anyway... I spoke with Chase last week about this, and it’s now much harder to link various accounts.... don’t know how BofA will handle that.