Lifting the Lid on UK Banks' Current Account Services

In a belated effort to improve competition for personal and business current accounts, new rules require banks to publish data on account opening, service availability and major incidents from 15 August 2018. Data on account-opening and debit card replacement will have to be published from 15 February 2019. Banks will need to start recording and measuring the time taken to open accounts and to replace a debit cards from 1 October 2018. Comparison sites are also likely to publish the data.

The measures exclude 'premium' customers who receive a better level of service linked to minimum credit balances or monthly deposits, and who represent fewer than 20% of customers. Otherwise, their experience could distort the picture of services that typical customers get.

The rules cover banks with more than 70,000 relevant personal current accounts or 15,000 business current accounts (held by ‘banking customers’) per brand. Other firms not required to publish the data may do so, in which case they should comply with the same rules to aid comparison (but are not in breach of any rules if they do not).