A bank is eight
machines in a row.
Money enters at a counter, travels in a sealed case, sits in a vault, leaves in a van and comes back out of a wall. Each of those is a mechanism with an owner, a rulebook and a price. Scroll the floor: the course is the building.
How an account is opened
Nothing moves until somebody decides you may have an account. Every large provider must publish how its own customers rate that decision, and the gap between the best and the worst desk in Britain is forty one points.
Read node 1How notes enter the system
The counter is where physical money becomes a balance, and the conversion is not free. Barclays keeps 90p of every hundred pounds handed across it.
Read node 2How money moves inside a bank
Notes do not stay at the counter. Two staff, sealed cases and a fixed route carry them to the vault, and the journey is billed backwards: small piles cost more than large ones.
Publishes 14 October 2026How money leaves the building
The van is the most expensive mile a pound travels. The same problem in software is moving your account somewhere else, which 1.2 million customers did last year.
Publishes 21 October 2026Where the money actually sits
A balance is a promise, not a room. Deposit cover rose to £120,000 in December 2025, and it only applies if the thing holding your money is a bank rather than an app.
Read node 5What a bank keeps but does not own
The clearest example of the line between custody and ownership. What sits in the box belongs to you and is protected by nothing the bank operates.
Publishes 28 October 2026How you reach money after hours
What remains when the counter closes. With 6,871 branches gone since 2015, the machine is increasingly the entire branch rather than a convenience beside it.
Publishes 04 November 2026How a bank watches itself
Monitoring, freezes and fraud rules: the part of banking that acts on you rather than for you. The ombudsman took 993 complaints about business accounts in one quarter.
Publishes 11 November 2026Follow one pound through the building.
This is the whole of business banking in eight steps. Everything else on this site is a measurement of one of them.
Prices shown are published tariffs read on 2 September 2026. Where a step has no price, the cost is time rather than money.
Eight nodes, eight lessons, one building.
Each lesson takes one mechanism, explains how it works, names who runs it and prices what it costs. Three are published; the rest arrive on the dates shown.
Full syllabus and how to work through itNot everything that gives you an account is a bank.
The word banking is not regulated. The word bank is. That single difference decides whether anybody compensates you when a provider fails, and it is almost never visible in the app.
Licence status from each provider's own published statements and the FCA register, read 2 September 2026. Node 5 works through what each status means for your balance.
Pick the job. Pick two providers. The survey does the scoring.
Every number here came from the provider's own customers. They were asked whether they would recommend one specific service to another business, and the score is the share who answered “extremely likely” or “very likely”. We weight nothing. Choose a job and the board counts the measures that job leans on, which is why the same two banks swap places twice on this page.
Points are the measures that matter for the chosen job, added up. A measure with no published ranking scores nothing, which is itself the answer for that job. Source: Ipsos for the CMA, published 17 August 2026, fieldwork July 2025 to June 2026.
All seventeen providers, five measures, one table.
Sort by any column. Five providers show nothing under branches, and that blank is the point: you cannot rate a counter that was never built.
Around 1,200 customers a year are surveyed for each provider and 20,400 in total. A score is published only where at least 100 customers rated that service.
Taking cash is a fee, and the fee is a percentage.
Drag the slider to whatever your business actually banks in notes. What comes back is the published tariff applied to that figure, plus the monthly fee where one exists. Barclays prints its own line as “Cash Payments (in or out) £0.90 (Per £100)”, and that is exactly what the calculator does with it. We estimate nothing.
Barclays tariff from its published business account price plans; Starling from its business account page; Tide from its published pricing. All checked 2 September 2026. Introductory free periods are excluded, because they end. Starling applies a minimum £3 per deposit, modelled here as four deposits a month.
Cash that never reaches a counter
Sometimes the money never goes anywhere. It sits in a safe until a van arrives. Barclays describes the service as “a secure and convenient way for customers to arrange for cash and cheques to be collected from their premises”, and what the trip costs depends entirely on how much is waiting.
Why this is the hardest question
Take notes and the best app stops deciding anything. Five of these seventeen providers run no branches. The twelve that do are closing them at fifty three a month between them, which is the whole problem in one number: the cheapest percentage and the nearest open counter belong to different banks, and you are picking which of the two you can live without.
Sixty nine per cent of the network is already gone.
Counts branches at twenty major current account providers. Source: Which? branch closure tracker, updated 7 July 2026.
The limit moved, and most price pages have not caught up.
Structure decides who gets paid. A limited company or an LLP is its own legal person, so it claims separately from the people behind it. A sole trader gets one claim covering everything, because in law the business and the owner are the same. On the day a provider fails, that detail matters more than any star rating.
Deposit protection from FSCS; complaint volumes and uphold rates from the Financial Ombudsman Service quarterly data for April to June 2026, published 22 July 2026. Both checked 2 September 2026.
Nine terms that decide real money.
Every one of these appears in a document you have already agreed to. Tap a term to see what it does to you.
What is coming, and when.
The remaining nodes publish on the dates below. After the course finishes we keep going with duels: one job, two providers, the published numbers behind them.