Best Online Banking Experience

How we picked the companies to evaluate:

We evaluated over 90 financial institutions, including the largest U.S. retail banks based on assets and internet search traffic; the nation’s largest credit unions, based on assets and membership; and other notable and/or emerging players in the industry. We rated them on criteria including annual percentage yields, minimum balances, fees, digital experience and more. Some of the providers are NerdWallet partners, but this did not influence our selection of the winner.

How we chose the winner:

The winning financial institution was the one with the top combined score in the Website Quality and App Store Ratings categories, determined by NerdWallet writers and editors. (For the Website Quality category, we considered whether users could intuitively find information on opening accounts, rates, fees, ATMs and branches. For App Store Ratings, we checked user ratings on each financial institution's iOS and Android apps.) In case of a tie, institutions were compared by category in the following order until one institution remained:
  • Checking account category star rating and the Overdraft category’s star rating. If the institution does not have a checking account or spending product, it will receive no points in this tiebreaker.
  • Savings account or savings product (interest rate contributed to 30% of the rating, monthly fees 25%, distinguishing features 20% and minimum opening deposit 25%; Also, up to 15% extra credit was given for a sign-up bonus). If the institution does not have a savings account or savings product, it will receive no points in this tiebreaker.
  • Highest average Banking rubric mobile app rating (can earn a rating between 1-5 stars in our rubric). We changed the threshold of how important the mobile app rating is for our rubric. Twitter is no longer going to be a source of customer service consideration for our star ratings, so we redistributed the points that would go to Twitter to mobile app ratings instead.
  • Highest average of the iOS app store rating and Android app store rating at time of review.

How we verified our data:

NerdWallet writers and editors confirmed fees, rates, policies and other key features on each financial institution’s website. If an institution’s website was missing information, we contacted a representative directly for confirmation.

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