Methodology for personal loan ratings

You may have noticed that some of our personal loans pages, tables and lender reviews come with “customers say” star ratings. These are customer satisfaction scores, where we asked consumers to tell us how good a service they were receiving from that company.

“Customers say” star ratings – calculated from our customer satisfaction survey

In December 2022, Finder ran an independent customer satisfaction survey about personal loan providers. We polled 1,347 customers, who told us how happy they were with their current lender. We then turned their answers into a rating of between one and five stars.

And here’s how we did it…

Customer satisfaction ratings methodology

The survey asked respondents how satisfied they were with their personal loan provider on a scale from one to five, and also whether they would recommend that company to a friend or not.

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

• How many people would recommend the company versus how many people wouldn’t. If you say you’d recommend your personal loan provider to a friend, it must mean it’s really good. This forms 50% of our customer satisfaction star rating.
• The proportion of people who rated a provider five out of five. Wow, five out of five? This counts for 25% of our customer satisfaction star rating.
• The average score each personal loan provider got. This tells us if a lender offers a solid service even though it doesn’t have loads of maximum ratings… or if it’s just not that great. This parameter forms the last 25% of our customer satisfaction star rating.

The final rating was then rounded to the nearest half star, to give the following one to five customer satisfaction range:

★★★★★ – Excellent

★★★★★ – Good

★★★★★ – Average

★★★★★ – Subpar

★★★★★ – Poor