Canstar reveals its Bank of the Year and Customer Owned Bank of the Year Award winners

Canstar has announced the winner of this year’s Customer Owned Bank of the Year Award, as well as its first ever Bank of the Year award.

Canstar’s Star Ratings & Awards are designed to help consumers when it comes to weighing up products on our database, like credit cards, home loans, and everyday bank accounts. But what if you want to know which banks and customer owned institutions offer the strongest combination of banking products? 

Canstar’s Bank of the Year and Customer Owned Bank of the Year Awards aim to help answer this question, by collating the results of our Star Ratings for home loans, savings and transaction accounts, term deposits, credit cards and personal and car loans. 

Our researchers also take customer satisfaction into account for the Bank of the Year Award, assessing it via a survey of more than 9,000 Australian consumers, asked to rate their overall satisfaction with their primary banking provider.

How were the winners decided? 

To determine the winner of this year’s Bank of the Year and Customer Owned Bank of the Year Awards, Canstar Research analysed the performance of each of the providers on our database across a selection of our individual product Star Ratings and Awards. The products were assigned weightings as follows: 

Bank of the Year Award

• Home loans – 40% 
• Deposit accounts (term deposits, savings and transaction accounts) – 20% 
• Credit cards – 20% 
• Personal and car loans – 10% 
• Customer satisfaction – 10% 

Customer Owned Bank of the Year Award

• Home loans – 40% 
• Deposit accounts – 25% 
• Credit cards – 20% 
• Personal and car loans – 15% 

Canstar Research awarded the Bank of the Year and Customer Owned Bank of the Year Awards to the providers in each category with the highest overall score. 

Bank of the Year Award – ING 

ING is the first ever winner of Canstar’s Bank of the Year Award. According to Canstar Research, ING has been recognised based on its market-beating deposit account offerings, and exceptionally strong performances when it came to home loans and personal loans. Of the 21 providers assessed for the Bank of the Year Award, ING also performed the best when it came to customer satisfaction. 

ING’s products consistently perform strongly in Canstar’s Star Ratings, with many of them recognised as offering Outstanding Value. For example, when it comes to home loans, at least one of ING’s products received a 5-Star Rating in each profile considered in the most recent Home Loan Star Ratings, and the bank performed similarly well across deposit accounts, with both its savings and transaction accounts receiving a 5-Star Ratings across various profiles. 

Part of the Europe-based ING Group, the bank is perhaps best-known in Australia for its online savings accounts, which it introduced to these shores 20 years ago. Since then, it has widened its product offering to include home loans, transaction accounts, superannuation, credit cards, personal lending and insurance. It says it now has more than two million customers in Australia.

Customer Owned Bank of the Year – Qudos Bank 

Qudos Bank has won this year’s Customer Owned Bank of the Year Award in a field that included more than 40 other mutual banks, credit unions and building societies. Canstar Research recognised the credit union for its strong performance across all products assessed for the Award, particularly its home loans and credit cards. 

Qudos Bank is a consistently strong performer in Canstar’s Star Ratings, with at least one of its home loans receiving a 5-Star Rating in each residential variable profile in the most recent Ratings, as well as several fixed-rate profiles. Qudos Bank’s credit cards and deposit accounts also contributed to its overall performance. 

Qudos Bank started life as the Qantas Credit Union in 1959, but rebranded in 2016. As a result, it describes itself as ‘the newest old bank on the block’, having served its customers for over 60 years. Its ties to Australia’s largest airline continue today through its offering of Qantas Points on a number of its products. 

To learn more about the results of Canstar’s Bank of the Year and Customer Owned Bank of the Year Awards, you can view the results for both Awards, and read the methodology documents for each Award (Bank of the Year and Customer Owned Bank of the Year).