The Fairer Finance Trust in Banking Index - Spring 2026 Update

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 scores across the banking sectors largely stagnated in Spring 2026. The personal loan and mortgage sectors saw small decreases in the average trust score while credit cards, current accounts and savings accounts all saw modest improvements.

Current Accounts

Starling saw a big drop of almost 3p.p in its trust score this wave but still has the 5th highest trust score overall. Nationwide has the highest trust score in Spring 2026 after improving by 1.5p.p to a score of 75.72%. The digital only banks continue to have trust scores much higher than the market average, and the average of the high street banks. The graph below shows the average trust scores of these groups over the past few years.

Monzo and Starling started spring 2022 with extremely high scores above 80%, these have fallen over time to around 70% as they became more established. In contrast Revolut and Chase have seen their scores improve over the same period from about 50% to just below 70%. The high street banks have seen smaller changes, with most now sitting close to a score of 60%. The two exceptions to this trend are Nationwide, who saw strong improvements moving from 69% to 75%, driven by its popular Fairer Share payments; and HSBC, who have stayed consistently much lower than the other brands close to a score of 50%. The graph below shows the movements of the individual banks over time.

Credit Card Trust by Financial Vulnerability

There is big discrepancy in trust scores between customers who are financially vulnerable and those that aren’t. We ask participants about financial vulnerability by checking if bills are a heavy burden for them, somewhat of a burden or no burden at all. For every brand, customers who do not find bills to be a burden report higher trust scores. This isn’t surprising in the credit card sector given credit card statements will be one of those monthly repayments people could struggle with, but the gap between those who are financially vulnerable and those that aren’t varies a lot between brands. Amongst the larger credit card providers Nationwide has the smallest gap between these customer cohorts, those that find bills to be a heavy burden only report trust scores around 5p.p lower than those that don’t find them to be a burden at all. Santander also has a relatively small gap of about 9p.p. For Santander this means it has the second highest trust scores amongst customers who find bills a heavy burden, a long way ahead of Natwest who sit in 3rd place amongst this cohort. This contrasts with Santander's 5th place when looking at customers who don’t struggle with bills.

Capital One has the largest gap between the customer cohort's trust scores at 33p.p, followed by American Express with almost 29p.p. What’s interesting is the very different type of customer, and intended use, or credit cards with American Express and Capital One. Capital One focuses on higher risk lending and helping customers build their credit score, 18% of Capital One customers in our survey stated that bills were a heavy burden. American Express focuses on rewarding card holders through points and perks. Only 5.5% of American Express customers in our survey said that bills were a heavy burden, the lowest of all the large brands, but the massive drop in trust between the different customer groups suggests that their struggling customers are not happy with the outcomes. This could be because those struggling are more likely to be paying lots in interest charges, subsidising the rewards for those customers that pay in full every month. The graph below shows the trust scores for both financially struggling customers and those without financial difficulty.