Assessment

FinHealth Standards for Spending Management Products: Evaluating Checking Accounts Across the Financial Services Industry

Explore which of the 12 FinHealth Standards are already gaining traction across widely available checking accounts, along with areas providers can prioritize to unlock better outcomes for all.

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By Trey Waters, Marisa Walster, Elvis Diaz, Angele Noel

Category:

Financial Services, Payments, Standards

Wednesday, October 8, 2025

FinHealth Standards for Spending Management Products: Evaluating Checking Accounts Across the Financial Services Industry

The Challenge

Assessing the FinHealth Standards

Over 50% of Americans spent as much or more than they earned last year.¹ Checking accounts are central to how consumers manage their finances, yet many accounts aren’t designed with financial health in mind.

Our first Industry Toolkit offered financial services providers a clear blueprint for transforming checking accounts and credit cards into tools for positive impact. But how effectively are providers applying them?

In the latest publication from our FinHealth Standards initiative, this Industry Assessment applies the Standards to checking accounts across the industry – highlighting gaps and identifying opportunities to drive real financial health impact.

What Did We Evaluate?

We assessed 20 widely available checking accounts from a range of providers using the FinHealth Standards across three key areas:

- Account Features: Tools that customers can use to manage their spending.
- Account Policies: Rules and practices that affect the cost and timing of accessing funds.
- Onboarding and Access: Design choices that determine who can access an account and how easily it can be managed over time.

By pinpointing where providers have incorporated the Standards and where opportunities remain, we can chart a path toward checking accounts that are designed to place customer financial health at the center.

Key Findings

Our assessment uncovered widespread gaps across all three categories of the FinHealth Standards.

Account Features
While 85% of accounts reviewed offer spending controls, none met the standard for a high-quality budgeting tool.

Account Policies
Although 90% of accounts met the monthly fee waiver standard, only 10% provided timely access to deposited funds.

Onboarding and Access
Free phone support is widely available (85%), but many accounts fell short on inclusion: 30% accept alternative identification or individual taxpayer identification numbers (ITIN) and just 1 of 20 met our full Spanish-language criteria.

Performance also varied by institution type:

- Accounts offered by large banks typically provided stronger account features, yet fell short in offering inclusive monthly fee waiver policies.
- Accounts from mid-sized banks had similar account features as large banks but were less likely to meet the Standards related to onboarding and access.
- Credit union accounts excelled in consumer-friendly fee policies and stood out in expediting same-day funds availability, though they lagged in account features.
- Digital-only accounts offered fee-free accounts, but fell significantly behind in providing comprehensive account features.

Explore the Scores

Explore our interactive scorecard to see how checking accounts in the assessment measure up to the Standards, and uncover insights to guide innovation and better serve your customers.

See the Scorecard

About the FinHealth Standards

This toolkit is part of the FinHealth Standards, a Financial Health Network initiative built on our two decades of expertise in shaping industry practices to support consumers’ financial lives. Grounded in rigorous research and deep collaboration, FinHealth Standards offer evidence-based guidance on building financial health solutions that improve outcomes across the key aspects of financial health: spending, saving, borrowing, and planning.

Learn About the Initiative

Endnotes

Andrew Warren, Shira Hammerslough, & Wanjira Chege, “Financial Health Pulse® 2025 U.S. Trends Report: Can Short-Term Gains Translate Into Lasting Progress?,” Financial Health Network, forthcoming.

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