Methodology for banking ratings

You may have noticed (you did, right?) that our current account pages, tables and reviews come with star ratings. They’re there to help consumers figure out how good a company and its products are, at a single glance. But they wouldn’t be fair, and we wouldn’t be transparent, if we didn’t tell you how we came up with them.

We publish two types of star ratings:

Finder’s ratings

You’ll find our expert ratings on our digital banking pages. We rate digital banking accounts using a system of one to five stars.

★★★★★ – Excellent

★★★★★ – Good

★★★★★ – Average

★★★★★ – Subpar

★★★★★ – Poor

How it works

To come up with our expert ratings, we score products across five key areas. Each contributes equally to the overall score.

• App rating. This is calculated by averaging the app’s rating in the Google Play Store and the App Store.
• Fees. This is measured in relation to similar apps on the market. Most banking apps are free, so we take into account the additional fees you may incur in certain circumstances, such as weekend fees, overdraft rates and exceeding a withdrawal limit.
• Customer service. This is also measured in relation to similar apps on the market. We score this based on our own experts’ use of the product, user feedback, press reports, customer reviews and forum discussions.
• Travelling. Many of our users ask about using banking apps abroad, since a major benefit of many of them is low-cost foreign transactions. We rank this in relation to other apps on the market and take into account the number of available currencies, which countries each app can work in, exchange rates, fees and foreign ATM withdrawals.
• Range of features. Some banking apps offer a limited number of features while others offer a wider range, with regular updates and releases. This includes access to features like overdrafts, loans, insurance and savings accounts. We rate these as we know they are important to users.
• Overall. This is an average of the above five scores, rounded to the nearest half point.

Customer satisfaction survey ratings

In December 2020, we ran a customer satisfaction survey on current accounts. 1,941 people answered and told us how happy they are with their current account provider. We’ve turned their answers into a star rating of between one and five.

★★★★★ – Excellent

★★★★★ – Good

★★★★★ – Average

★★★★★ – Subpar

★★★★★ – Poor

Customer satisfaction ratings methodology

The survey asked respondents how satisfied they are with their current account on a scale from one to five, and also whether they would recommend it to a friend or not.

We turned the answers into an overall star rating that takes into account:

• How many people would recommend the account vs how many people wouldn’t. If you say you’d recommend your bank to a friend when sitting at the pub in front of a pint, it must mean it’s really good (the bank, not the pint). This forms 50% of our customer satisfaction rating.
• How many people rated a provider five out of five. Wow, five out of five? This counts for 25% of our customer satisfaction rating.
• The average score each current account provider got. This tells us if a bank offers quite a solid service even though it doesn’t have loads of top ratings… or if it’s just not that great. This parameter forms the last 25% of our overall customer satisfaction rating.

The final rating is then rounded to the nearest half star.