While you are empirically correct that banks don't earn the significant amounts of money just from individual savings accounts, it would be logically flawed to

While you are empirically correct that banks don't earn the significant amounts of money just from individual savings accounts, it would be logically flawed to assume that savings accounts (a means of collecting temporary use of additional funds relatively cheaply) are designed to be profitable. It's an interesting market where the product you are harvesting is the one which is used to buy that product. The banks that you or I recognise as every day banks almost certainly don't make their money on corporate loans. The margins aren't high enough. The only point I would agree with from this article is that when companies become large enough they tend towards becoming banks. The nuance here is that a traditional bank makes the bulk of its money by having control of the bulk of your money so they can sell stuff like homeloans, as you mentioned with the housing market, which aren't glamorous, but do make bucket loads of money. An organisation that didnt start out as a purely financially focused investment/risk management machine but which does become, technically, a bank is an organisation which grows large enough that it needs to give some money back to fund all the people buying its wares. As an example, look at IBM - who do you think loans money to companies who pay billions for an IBM project? Often its IBMs Global Financial Services business. They can give you a killer rate because everything you borrow is used to fund another part of the business and can be fed back into the cycle. The more interesting situation with Apple is that they, almost exclusively, sell consumer goods. So they are stuck with customers who probably can't afford to, and aren't at all motivated to, take out large loans to pay for their new gadget (Hence apple partnerships with enterprises ie. the aforementioned IBM as they struggle to get out of the consumer goods market. Note - this is not to imply that IBM is doing better than apple, they just have much wealthier customers) The only thing that I'm relatively sure about is that apple isn't seeking to trump mastercard and visa, as the article seems to suggest, nor to become the bank of the people, because both options make less financial sense than continuing to be insanely profitable as technical designers and manufacturers in a cross-industry market such as technology.