25th June 2025
Trust rises again across all five banking sectors, with very similar rises in each sector. This continues the long term trend of rising trust in banking sectors since we started the survey in Spring 2015. The average trust score in banking sectors has risen 54% over the past 10 years.
Every six months, Fairer Finance polls 10,000 banking customers and asks them:
'Based on everything you know about this provider, to what extent would you agree or disagree with the following statement - "I trust [name of their provider]"'
We use the responses from this question to create a trust score, which allows us to track perceptions of trust in banking providers in our Trust in Banking Index.
To create our trust score we subtract the negative responses from positive ones and double-weight the extreme responses to factor in strong opinions. This helps to simplify the responses and gives us a score which is a single number.
Trust has risen again across the five main consumer banking sectors, with similar rises seen in each sector. This continues the long term trend of increasingly high trust scores since Fairer Finance began polling customers in 2015. The rate of increase has slowed since 2022 and Spring 2025 showed a continuation of the moderate gains in trust scores across these sectors.
Amongst some of the largest credit card providers there are huge variations in trust scores. Nationwide and American Express have consistently been well above the sector average, whereas Capital One and HSBC have generally trailed quite far below it.
Although the trends are very similar there are stark differences in the trust scores of the big established banks and the new digitally focussed challengers in the current account market. The gap has closed a little since spring 2022 but the challengers still scored on average around 5p.p higher in Spring 2025 than the big banks.
However there are large outliers within these groups. Within the big bank group Nationwide has consistently had trust scores far above its peers, and also consistently higher than the challengers average. Within the challenger banks the slightly older pair of brands with a branch network (Virgin Money and Metro Bank) score much lower than the newer branchless challengers. Virgin Money has consistently scored below the big 6 average and Metro Bank has fallen below that average since autumn 2024.
These differences are shown on the graph below. When you remove Nationwide from the big 6 and Metro Bank / Virgin Money from the challengers the difference in trust scores between the big 5 and the online only challengers is much larger. The online only challengers currently have a trust score 15p.p higher than the big 5
Looking at other aspects of our consumer polling, the challengers, unsurprisingly, score much better on perceptions of their digital capability and online customer service than the established banks. This is important for many people, especially for the younger customer base that the challengers primarily serve. The branchless challengers may also benefit from no expectation of branch services. Many customers with the big 6 will want to use the branch network but some of them will likely have found this increasingly difficult with closures and reduced opening hours in recent years. This may partly explain the differing levels of trust but is unlikely to be the main driver.
Another factor could be that the challenger banks don’t offer as many products in other sectors, their brands are primarily known for their current accounts. On the other hand the larger banks offer a range of products including mortgages, loans and credit cards. Customers with a bad experience of a big 6 provider in a different product might alter their perceptions for the current account as well. For example raising interest rates for credit card and mortgage products might decrease trust in current account holders.
The cause could also be in the features of the products they offer. A common feature of challenger banks is lower fees, especially for spending or withdrawing money abroad. Some of the big banks offer low or zero foreign use fees but these tend to be on more exclusive accounts, and often with an annual fee attached. Whatever the reason or combination of them, the data is clear that customers trust the branchless challenger banks much more than the big 5.
When looking at the brand level there are some notable consistencies with the credit card sector. Once again HSBC and Barclays are consistently below the sector average, while Nationwide is far above it. In current accounts Santander tends to hang around just below the average trust score, while in credit cards it tends to be just above the average. Lloyds and Halifax sit very close to the current account average and Natwest has been below it in recent years.
Starling has frequently had the highest trust score since reaching a big enough sample to enter our data, with Monzo always close. Revolut and Chase have scored consistently well since reaching a significant sample, but always lower than Starling or Monzo.
1 The question has the following options: "strongly agree", "agree", "neither agree nor disagree", "disagree" and "strongly disagree". The trust index score is calculated using the following formula: ((% answering strongly agree x 2) + (% answering agree) + (% answering disagree x -1) + (% answering strongly disagree x -2))/ 2. We use this formula to subtract those who distrust a provider from those who trust them, to give additional weight to those answering strongly agree and strongly disagree, and to create a single score to compare sectors and track change over time.