Methodology for kids’ prepaid card ratings

You may have noticed (you did, right?) that our kids’ prepaid 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 banking pages. We rate bank accounts using a system of 1 to 5 blue stars.

★★★★★ – Excellent

★★★★★ – Good

★★★★★ – Average

★★★★★ – Subpar

★★★★★ – Poor

How it works

We assess products across a number of key areas:

• Fees. We consider whether these is a monthly fee for the card and whether it charges you for things like top-ups or ATM withdrawals. If there are charges for making purchases abroad or taking money out from a foreign ATM, that is also taken into account.
• Controls and safeguards. We score this based on what controls or safeguards the card as in place, like ability to freeze and unfreeze the card, age-restricted sales and ATM withdrawal limits.
• App features. We look at what educational features the app has, whether or not you can set savings goals and what type of earning functionality is in place.
• App rating. 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.

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’ prepaid 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.