The Business Banking Expert
How this site works
How the money flows, what it does and does not influence, and how to verify any of it.
How we make money
Some links to providers earn us a commission if you open an account. That is the whole model. We do not charge readers, we do not run display advertising, and we do not sell data.
You never pay more for using our link, and it makes no difference to whether a provider accepts your application.
What commission does not affect
- The ranking order. Accounts are ordered by their weighted score, calculated from published criteria.
- The scores themselves. Seven criteria with published weightings, applied identically to every account.
- What we are willing to say. Several accounts at the top of our ranking pay us nothing. Several that would pay us are ranked low, and we say why.
The structural protection is that our methodology is published in full. If commission were skewing the ranking, you could catch us by recalculating.
Why some accounts have a score cap
No account without FSCS protection on its everyday balance can score above 3.5 out of 5, whatever its features. Several popular providers are e-money institutions rather than banks. We do not think a better app compensates for the absence of a statutory guarantee, and we show the cap on the page rather than burying it in a total.
Where our numbers come from
- Fees and rates — providers’ own published tariffs and pricing pages, with the date we checked recorded on the page.
- Service quality — the independent survey UK banks must publish under the CMA’s Retail Banking Order, carried out by BVA BDRC (now part of Ipsos), combined with public review platforms.
- Regulatory status — the FCA Financial Services Register.
- Interest — modelled net of the plan cost required to reach each rate, on a representative £25,000 balance.
Figures we have not verified against a provider’s own source are labelled unverified rather than presented as fact. We would rather show you which is which than offer one confident number built partly on guesses.
How to check us
- Recalculate a score. The weightings and every component are published.
- Check a fee against the provider’s tariff. We name the source and the date.
- Check the CMA data. It is published independently and we quote positions and percentages, not impressions.
- Check the FCA Register for any provider’s regulatory status.
- Tell us when we are wrong. We correct openly — see complaints.
Who writes it
A former UK business banker with ten years’ experience across a high-street bank and a digital challenger, writing under a pen name. The reasoning, and why you should check the work rather than trust the byline, is on the about page.