8th January 2026
Trust rises sharply across all five banking sectors, mortgages and personal loans see the biggest increase in trust. 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 the banking sectors has risen from 38.09% to 60.44% 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 the biggest rises seen in personal loans and mortgages. This continues the long term trend of increasingly high trust scores since Fairer Finance began polling customers in 2015. This wave saw the biggest increase in trust since spring 2022.
The highest increase was in mortgages, with an average improvement of 2.92p.p. This still leaves mortgages as the least trusted of the banking sectors, but it now sits only just behind personal loans. The large improvement in trust scores for personal loans and mortgages is likely a result of base rate changes leading to lower monthly repayments for most customers.
Mortgages
Amongst the 6 biggest mortgage lenders HSBC saw the most significant improvement from spring 2025, jumping by over 6p.p to a score of 58.89%. This puts HSBC second for trust amongst the biggest lenders, following 3 consecutive waves at the bottom of this group. Nationwide continues to be the strongest performer amongst the major lenders, sitting more than 8p.p clear of second place HSBC. The chart below shows the trust scores of the biggest lenders since the base rate started changing significantly in December 2021.
Savings
The picture in the savings market looks very similar with Nationwide clearly leading the large providers and the rest closer together. Lloyds Bank has been second amongst the large savings providers every wave since Spring 2023 and are the only provider besides Nationwide with scores above the market average. HSBC has tended to be in the bottom two and has come last amongst this group for the past two waves, despite a gain of nearly 2 percentage points in the most recent wave.