Canstar reveals its 2021 Bank of the Year & Customer-Owned Bank of the Year Award Winners

Find out who came out on top this year in Canstar’s Bank of the Year and Customer-Owned Bank of the Year Awards.

Choosing a financial institution to bank with can be a major decision, and there are many important factors and considerations that come into play, including how it performs in areas such as home loans, savings and transaction accounts, term deposits, credit cards and personal and car loans. If you’re wondering which financial institutions perform strongly across all these areas, Canstar can help.

Our Bank of the Year and Customer-Owned Bank of the Year Awards are given to the banks that offer customers the strongest combination of products across all of these key areas.

The Bank of the Year Award also takes customer satisfaction into account, considering how banks perform across the areas of customer service, value for money, communication, digital banking, fees and charges, product range and interest rates.

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 (savings and transaction accounts and term deposits) – 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 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. For more information on how the awards are determined, you can read Canstar’s methodology for Bank of the Year here and Customer Owned Bank of the Year here.

Bank of the Year Award – ING

For the second year running, ING has taken out Canstar’s Bank of the Year Award, in a field that included more than 20 other providers. The bank recently shook up the terms and conditions for its savings accounts, requiring customers to grow the balance of their nominated savings account each month to qualify for bonus interest. Nonetheless, ING’s Savings Maximiser remains one of the best interest rates available in the market (at the time of writing) for those able to meet these conditions. ING performed well across all the core banking areas this year, particularly credit cards and home loans, and scored especially high in the area of customer satisfaction.

Part of the Europe-based ING Group, the bank launched in Australia 20 years ago,and  introduced the country’s first high interest, fee-free online savings account  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 Award – Qudos Bank

Qudos Bank has won this year’s Customer-Owned Bank of the Year Award in a field that included more than 30 other mutual banks, credit unions and building societies. This year, Qudos Bank performed competitively across all the core banking areas, and continues to provide branch access to customers in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, adding value for customers who appreciate face-to-face service.

Qudos Bank started life as the Qantas Credit Union in 1959, but rebranded in 2016. As a result, it describes itself as ‘the oldest new 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 rewards on a number of its products.

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