With digital banking becoming ever prevalent in the UK, banks are scrambling to provide the best digital experience to attract and retain customers. Against this backdrop, First Direct has emerged as the leading UK bank for net satisfaction of digital experience in 2022, reveals GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

GlobalData’s UK Competitor Benchmarking report 2022, which ranks the UK banks in order of average digital experience for customers, highlights the areas where the UK customers are dissatisfied with digital banking and where he banks can make improvements to attract more customers in the future.

According to the report, there is a 20 percentage points (pp) difference of average net satisfaction score between First Direct and the lowest ranked, the Bank of Scotland.

The lowest net satisfaction scores for UK banks came in their omnichannel and digital problem resolution where there is lot of variances between all competitors.

Harry Swain, Retail Banking Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “First Direct leads the market in both attributes, with Lloyds Bank providing good digital problem resolution compared to the rest of the UK banks. The Co-operative Bank and the Bank of Scotland both perform well below the average here and need to improve to better their average score. Halifax provides good transition from digital to human channels and performs on the same level as First Direct.”

The report says that with banks encouraging customers to increase their digital channel usage, customers seek support to better understand the features and processes that they use.

Swain explains: “First Direct helps its customers the most in this area too. Monzo, which is an entirely digital bank, performs the worst in this area with its customers being least satisfied with the bank helping with digital banking and the bank may be of the impression that all its customers are already digitally competent.”

According to the report, the eight attributes that contribute to the customer digital experience rankings are easy navigation of platform, wide range of products, simple process to access account, appealing branding and features, digital problem resolution, omnichannel, clarity of financial situation, and helping customers better use digital banking.

Swain concludes: “The net satisfaction of these attributes gives banks a good indication of where they are performing in comparison to their competitors and whether they are meeting the market average.”