Metro Bank tops customer service survey as challenger bank grows in popularity
Metro Bank has topped an industry-wide customer service survey despite battling an accounting error, which has hit shares in recent weeks.
The challenger bank knocked First Direct off the top spot in a Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) survey based on whether customers at the UK’s 16 largest current account providers would recommend their bank to friends and family.
Nationwide, Coventry Building Society and Barclays and Yorkshire Bank – equal 5th – made up the top five.
The survey took views from around 1,000 customers from each of the 16 banks.
Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) came in at the bottom of the table, with just 47 per cent of customers likely to recommend the bank to others.
| Bank | Customer satisfaction |
| Metro Bank | 83 per cent |
| First Direct | 82 per cent |
| Nationwide | 72 per cent |
| Coventry Building Society | 70 per cent |
| Barclays | 64 per cent |
| Yorkshire Bank | 64 per cent |
| Santander | 61 per cent |
| Halifax | 60 per cent |
| Lloyds Bank | 60 per cent |
| Natwest | 59 per cent |
| Bank of Scotland | 58 per cent |
| HSBC UK | 57 per cent |
| TSB | 52 per cent |
| The Co-operative Bank | 52 per cent |
| Clydesdale Bank | 51 per cent |
| Royal Bank of Scotland | 47 per cent |
CMA chief executive Andrea Coscelli said: "If people are unhappy with the customer service they are currently getting, I would encourage them to look at the results and think about switching to a better performing bank.”
Metro Bank trebled profits in the first nine months of last year and said it was on course to hit £50m pre-tax profit for the full year.
More than 100,000 new customers joined the bank in the fourth quarter as its rise in popularity continued.
But shares slid to record lows earlier this month as the challenger bank flagged up an accounting error.
It said the mistakes, in the way it had calculated the weight of some commercial loans and buy-to-let loans to major landlords, would take a chunk out of its risk-weighted assets.
Following the survey, a Metro Bank spokesperson said: "We are extremely proud to have secured the top spot for our personal current account and maintained our position for our business current account."
The survey also produced results for online and mobile banking services, overdraft services and in-branch experience.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, TSB was 16th when it came to online and mobile banking services.
The challenger bank suffered an IT meltdown last year, which prevented up to 1.9m from accessing their accounts from a number of weeks.
Earlier this month TSB said that the move away from its IT systems – causing the chaos – cost the bank £330m.
It said around 80,000 customers left the bank over the course of the year.
First Direct led the way online with 83 per cent of customers willing to recommend their online and mobile banking services, followed by Barclays as customers shrugged off a major outage in September last year.