First Direct

Deconstructing the notion that these banks have feature parity in 2023.

Historically, bank cards were relatively simple rectangles of plastic. But not any more.

A unique opportunity to revisit these 12 banks, re-benchmark them, and highlight what 900 days of progress looks like.

There are some clear winners and losers here. But overall, the user experience of customer support is desperate for some innovation.

Although the challenger banks were considerably faster, all of the banks could improve the experience of using Open Banking.

Quite clearly, if you want to make international payments frequently you have to use a challenger bank, or Barclays.

Whilst the challenger banks have made this feature more accessible, they had a poor overall experience. Barclays was considerably better.

With a few exceptions, there wasnt a huge variance in the amount of effort, or time taken to send a payment from any of the banks.

The challenger banks were significantly quicker (in days) and required less effort (in clicks) to get an active account.