Building Societies dominate savings accounts and mortgage best-buy tables
Building societies are topping the best-buy tables when it comes to consumers' preferred savings accounts and mortgage providers, an independent consumer group reveals. Fairer Finance helps consumers to find a bank or building society that offers a good service, not just a good rate.
Building societies are topping the best-buy tables when it comes to consumers' preferred savings accounts and mortgage providers, an independent consumer group reveals. Fairer Finance helps consumers to find a bank or building society that offers a good service, not just a good rate.
Factors such as customer happiness, trust, complaints performance and transparency all determine the placing of the financial service providers. Financial services providers include high street, digital and challenger banks, building societies and other mutuals.
Six of the top 10 savings accounts are building societies, including Coventry, Principality, Skipton, Nationwide, Leeds and Yorkshire building society. Newcastle and the Chelsea building societies also appear in the top 20.
In terms of mortgages, half of the top ten lenders are building societies. The Coventry, Yorkshire and Nationwide make up three of the top five, with Skipton and Chelsea building societies appearing in the top ten.
Robin Fieth, Chief Executive of the Building Societies Association said:
“I am delighted but not surprised to see building societies topping tables for both mortgages and savings accounts.
“Customer satisfaction, trust, great service and, of course, competitive rates have always been the foundations of building societies’ values. I am glad to see that these qualities are also recognised by customers when choosing their mortgage and savings account providers.”
Fairer Finance commented:
“Mutuals now top five of the nine sectors that we look at – bank accounts, mortgages, savings, car insurance and travel insurance. And in the other four sectors – you’ll find a mutual in the top five in all but life insurance (which is tellingly the only sector where we don’t include customer polling).
“So from a customer happiness perspective, mutuality appears to be working. Customers are starting to appreciate that being part of a mutual means that you are an owner of the business, and should be the beneficiary of a more customer centric approach than some of the privately held companies around. On customer service and customer values, they are leading the way.”
