Britain’s Best Bank 2010: HSBC

OK, so it's not scientific, but I've been looking at the UK's banks from four dimensions this week:

• Customers
• Employees
• Investors
• Regulators

To the best of my databank's knowledge, the attributes and reviews are pretty accurate and have turned up some surprising results.  For example, who would have thought that the UK's most stable bank would be the Royal Bank of Scotland?  Mind you, I suppose it is government owned and therefore it should be pretty stable.

So here's the final result:

Yep, HSBC wins overall for all but one aspect: it's Tier I Capital Ratio.

Barclays do well generally, but their customer service needs focus.

RBS and Lloyds ... well, it's nice to know you can only get better.

Santander, Co-operative, Nationwide ... mixed results, and they're not included here as they don't register on all dimensions ... but at least the analysis given tells me that they're all doing some things right.

Mind you, I actually started this analysis because of Santander doing some things wrong, with their Partenon project stumbling and rubbish results in all of the customer satisfaction surveys.

So how come their pre-tax profit rose 10% and sales grew 6% in the first half of 2010?

Because they're the only bank that's lending ...

Santander UK claimed that it increased lending to small and medium-sized businesses by 20 per cent and wrote one in five mortgages to UK households, based on its gross lending market share of 19 per cent. Gross mortgage lending was £12.3bn in the first six months of this year, which is ahead of last year’s first half results of 14 per cent.

Source: FT Advisor