Take a bow Santander and Nationwide: the clear early winners of the UK Payment Council’s seven day current account switching initiative.
By contrast, Barclays, Cooperative Bank, Clydesdale, HSBC and RBS NatWest are net losers.
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The Payments Council has thrown a huge amount of time and money into the seven day switching project and by its own KPIs: public awareness of and confidence in the service, the initiative can be regarded as successful.
By the end of December 2014 more than two-thirds of people (69%) in the UK were aware of the Current Account Switch Service – up from 59% at the end of the year before. Customer confidence in the new service was similarly high, increasing from 58% to 65% over the same period.
Actual switching rates have only inched up by 12% year-on-year.
In 2014 there were 1.16m switches up from 1.03m in 2013.
In total, there are more than 76m current accounts (about 65m are used regularly) in the UK held by around 49m customers, meaning that only 2.4% of customers switched in 2014.
