Methodology for kids’ bank card scores

You may have noticed (you did, right?) that our kids’ debit card pages, tables and reviews come with scores. 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 2 types of score:

Finder’s expert scores

You’ll find our expert scores on our kids’ bank card pages. We rate the cards using a system of 1 to 5 blue stars.

★★★★★ – Excellent

★★★★★ – Good

★★★★★ – Average

★★★★★ – Subpar

★★★★★ – Poor

How it works

We assess kids’ prepaid cards across a number of key areas:

• Fees. We consider whether there is a monthly fee for the account and also whether the account charges for things like ordering a card, loading funds to the card or ATM withdrawals. If there are charges for making purchases abroad or taking out money from a foreign ATM , that is also taken into account.
• Controls and safeguards. We consider whether there are controls and safeguards such as age-restricted sales, instant notifications, spending limits, PIN reminders and the ability to freeze and unfreeze the card.
• App features. We score this based which features the app has including savings goals, educational features, earning functionality for chores, giftlinks for relatives, a separate app or profile for the child and the ability to add a co-parent.
• App ratings. This is calculated by averaging the banking app’s score in the Google Play Store and the App Store.

We average all these scores to come up with an overall Finder score.

How we decide which features are most important

Using and comparing kids’ debit cards then sharing our findings is what we do.

Each factor in our scoring is weighted. We asked consumers what matters to them when choosing a card for their child, and took this into account when deciding how to weight our scores.

Fees	Controls & safeguards	App features	App rating
30%	30%	20%	20%

Your reviews and our customer survey

You can see review stars at the top of our review pages, if we’ve received more than 10. These are from consumers just like you who use our site and want to review the products and providers they use. We include responses we’ve received in our annual customer satisfaction surveys. We also show the results of each survey in a league table in guides and in our awards pages.

In December 2023, we ran a customer satisfaction survey on kids’ cards. 500 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 1 and 5 and we show this in our annual league table of bank account providers.

★★★★★ – Excellent

★★★★★ – Good

★★★★★ – Average

★★★★★ – Subpar

★★★★★ – Poor

Customer satisfaction score methodology

The survey asked respondents how satisfied they are with their current account on a scale from 1 to 5, 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 score.