A slick and easy to use mobile app has become a must-have for challenger banks, but not all financial institutions are quite there yet. We’ve had a look at who’s able to offer you the best control of your money purely from your phone.
While challenger banks still represent the lion’s share of the top-rated apps, many traditional banks are catching up and adding innovative features to their banking apps, so the competition is hotting up. This guide focuses on apps for personal banking. We have created a guide to best business accounts for anyone looking for an app to run their business account from.
| Rank | App | Review | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 |  | Starling | Absolutely packed with features, Starling’s banking app is easy to use and lets you handle all aspects of your current account, including categorising your spending, setting savings goals and paying in cheques digitally. | Visit Starling |
| #2 |  | Monzo | Monzo’s reputation for being one of the coolest banking apps available isn’t unwarranted. It’s slick and colourful, lets you access all the features of your bank account and its spending reports make budgeting almost fun. | Visit Monzo |
| #3 |  | Revolut | The Revolut app integrates effortlessly in your day-to-day money life, offering a series of useful features for saving and organising your finances, including spending notifications and savings pots. | Read our review |
| #4 |  | Lloyds Bank | Lloyds tops the chart of traditional banks and has got all your banking bases covered, from carrying out your everyday banking and making payments, to categorising your spending and planning a budget. | Read our review |
| #5 |  | Barclays | The Barclays app meets all your basic banking need and more, with spending notifications, card locking and a 24/7 in-app customer support chat. | Read our review |
| #6 |  | NatWest | The NatWest app comes with all the standard banking features you’d expect, plus card freezing, spending categories and cheque scanning. | Read our review |
| #7 |  | Royal Bank of Scotland | The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) app also offers digital cheque deposits and card locking, as well as spending analysis and all the usual banking features. | Read our review |
| #8 |  | Halifax | Halifax has built a solid banking app, where you can log in using face or touch ID, see what you’ve spent and where, and round up your spare change from purchases. | Read our review |
| #9 |  | Bank of Scotland | You can use a biometric log in for the Bank of Scotland app, receive spending notifications, freeze your card and round up your spare change. | Read our review |
| #10 |  | Monese | Digital-only Monese has all you would expect in its banking app, from the ability to instantly freeze your card if you lose it, to spending pots and a nice visualisation of your spending data. | Read our review |
Did we choose according to who we liked best or who used the brightest colours? Not really. We developed a methodology that comes with a big spreadsheet you don’t really want to have to look at, assigned points to all the major banking apps available on the UK market and then ranked them accordingly to come up with a top 10.
Our methodology essentially takes two big areas into account:
While it’s great to have a bank account with an intelligent mobile app, most consumers would agree that this shouldn’t be their only priority. You may prefer to choose your bank based on the interest rates, rewards and customer service offered instead.
So here are some factors you may want to consider when choosing the best bank (and app) for your needs:
An easy to use mobile app with a range of useful features can make your banking experience much easier.
The breed of newer challenger banks that operate primarily via smartphone apps and online banking have been able to build their customer base by offering a strong user experience. Tops apps from the likes of Starling and Monzo enable account holders to manage their finances effortlessly, budget at the touch of a button and keep their accounts secure.
The larger established banks are starting to up their game too, with high street names like Lloyds and Barclays offering great apps for their customers to manage their accounts easily. Elsewhere, NatWest customers are able to withdraw cash from the bank’s ATM network via a unique code generated by its smartphone app.
Think about which features are most important for your day-to-day banking app needs before making your choice.
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