Survey: Many account holders don’t trust their bank

Don’t trust your bank? You’re not alone.

A new survey from Fool.co.uk has found that two out of three customers of the Big 5 UK banks don’t have confidence that their banks will sell them the right products, while one out of six claim that their bank has not kept track of their money correctly and one in eight say that they’ve been sold a bank product with bad advice.

Barclays (LSE: BARC; NYSE: BCS; TYO: 8642) is the least trusted bank, according to the survey, with nearly three-fourths of its customers worried that the bank doesn’t have the customer’s best interests in mind when selling them a product. The most trusted of the five is HSBC (LSE: HSBA; NYSE: HBC; Euronext: HSBC; SEHK: 005), with Lloyds TSB (LSE: LLOY), RBS (LSE: RBS; NYSE: RBS PRM), and HBOS (LSE: HBOS) coming in somewhere in the middle.

This is particularly worrisome, says David Kuo, who heads personal finance at Fool, at a time when finance and financial products are becoming more complex so that customers must rely more on their banks to give them the right advice without having to wonder about the bank’s real intentions. Mr. Kuo advises bank customers to question their banks more closely and to remember that it is easier to move bank accounts than it ever has been before. Shopping around, not only to find the best deal but to find the bank that seems more trustworthy, is in the customer’s best interest.

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