Executive Summary
- Many Americans need assistance managing their finances, but often their primary financial providers’ checking products don’t do enough to help, according to a new study.
- What’s missing? Many accounts lack a robust set of budgeting and spending control tools. But the Financial Health Network finds other deficiencies as well.
- The group’s report and a related toolkit point the way to improvements that could help institutions achieve primacy.
How well does your institution’s checking account meet the needs of the majority of modern consumers? If your offerings resemble the cross-section of checking accounts recently studied in depth by the Financial Health Network, likely not well at all.
The good news is that this is a problem that can be fixed.
The organization has developed a set of FinHealth Standards for evaluating financial products that is premised in part on a finding, in its 2025 Financial Health Pulse, that just over half of Americans spent as much or more than they earned in 2024. In addition, the pulse study found that almost a third of households surveyed had missed at least one bill payment in 2024.
The group’s conclusion: Millions of retail banking consumers’ checking accounts lack features that can help them manage daily spending. Checking accounts should be more than a place to accept, accumulate and disburse funds, and become instead a personal money management tool.
FHN has published an evaluation of mainstream checking accounts offered by 20 organizations: five major banks, five mid-sized banks, five major credit unions, and five digital-only providers. The research does not identify the specific institutions, although FHN selected the 20 providers based on their retail banking reach. A companion to the study is a separate toolkit for improving an individual financial company’s checking offerings. (The toolkit also has suggestions for improving credit card programs.)
The study found that only four of the 20 checking accounts evaluated met even half of the financial health standards in the framework. The three broad categories FHN used for analyzing accounts offered include Account Features, Account Policies, and Onboarding and Access.
How Products Measure Up on Account Features
Consider tools for help in controlling spending. The report found that while 85% of the institutions give account holders some degree of spending control using self-set alerts, none met the FHN’s standards for a high-quality budgeting tool. Even larger banks and digital-only providers came up short in various account feature types.
“Tools that help people proactively manage their money are no longer ‘nice-to-haves’,” the report says. “They are essential to a checking account that supports financial health. Yet our analysis shows that while most financial institutions recognize the need for safety rails, they’ve been slow to adopt the next generation of money management features.”
Two features that most offerings lack are balance forecasting and money labeling.
Balance forecasting uses transaction data to predict expected balances. Only one out of five accounts offer that. Money labeling means enabling the account holder to set aside a portion of a checking account for specific purposes under the name for that goal or need. Only one in 10 accounts enable this function. Similarly, only one in five offerings allow users to set up customized budget categories.
The toolkit cited the independent budgeting software YNAB (You Need a Budget) as an example of effective money labeling. The program enables consumers to assign funds from all accounts linked to the service to categories and purposes so that every dollar coming in “has a home.” A competitive service, Monarch Money, is cited as an example of how custom budget categorization.
Only about half of the accounts studied provided customers with the ability to identify, track, manage and adjust recurring payments. This is especially notable given the growing use of subscription-based services.
The report highlights Rocket Money as an example of how to provide a view of recurring payments. The company’s feature also allows users to cancel subscriptions from within its mobile app, rather than having to go directly to the subscription provider.
Another key criticism: lack of easy “findability.” FHN set a standard of being able to reach information about an account feature within one click of the main account page.
“Only a few accounts met the one-click threshold,” says the report, “meaning many useful tools are effectively hidden from view.”
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