Ask any bank or building society and they will say that their number one focus is the customer. And this may well be true – but which customers have preferential treatment – corporate or individual?

Why do we choose a bank or building society to save with or borrow money from? Convenience? Brand loyalty?

Mutuals
We recommend supporting a mutual building society rather than a bank. Why? Profits from investment which drive ‘banking’ for building societies go back into the building society enabling them to offer you the best rates  - there are no shareholders to pay dividends to (unlike banks) and, ethically speaking, this represents something worth paying attention to. I think we’d all like to be a part of something which actually allows you to get back what you put in without providing a load of unrelated rich people with further wealth from the proceeds of your own money.

Ethical concerns
Banks and their holding of Third World debt has been a concern for many decades now. Many banks have now written off these debts as they were unlikely to recoup the loans and realised that bad publicity from these holdings were significantly harming their image. However just because we have not heard anything more of this in recent years does not mean that it does not continue.

 

When we talk of ethical banking we use a whole plethora of criteria to decide what is an ethical bank/building society. These concerns include whether a bank is involved in the political donations; whether it has investments in countries that have a poor human rights’ record; whether it is involved in the arms trade either directly or indirectly; whether it has a poor record with regard to its employees around the world and whether it is somehow involved (again either directly or indirectly) in animal rights abuse.