A bank comparison site with its sources attached

Bank Compass is an independent editorial comparison site for U.S. consumer finance products. It covers 10 banks, 28 deposit accounts and 41 credit cards, plus mortgage lenders, personal and auto loan providers, insurers, brokerages and robo-advisors, and student lenders — 115 products in total, each one a record with named fields rather than a paragraph of marketing copy.

Every one of those fields carries two things the rest of this industry usually leaves out: a link to the document the number came from, and the date someone last opened that document to check. There are 470such fields on the site right now. When a figure can't be confirmed against a primary source, the page shows the gap as a gap — “not verified yet” — instead of filling it with something plausible.

• Not a bank. Bank Compass holds no money, moves no money, is not FDIC-insured, and has no account to open. Nothing here is a banking product.
• Not financial advice. Nothing on this site is written for your circumstances, because your circumstances aren't knowable from here. It's reference material for a decision you make yourself, ideally after reading the bank's own disclosure — which is why every figure links to it.
• Not a lead generator. There are no affiliate links, no referral fees, no “apply now” partnerships and no paid placement. Outbound links go to the institution's own page and earn this site nothing.
• Not a data broker. There is no signup, no login and no account. The site doesn't ask for your name, your email, your income or your credit score, and it has no database to put them in.

Rates, fees, bonuses and limits are collected by hand from the institution that sets them or the federal body that publishes them, across 64 distinct sources. The public bodies cited across the catalog and the 27 published guides are the 8 you would expect to find behind these numbers: CFPB, FDIC, Federal Reserve, Federal Student Aid, FTC, IRS, NCUA and SEC (Investor.gov). Not one figure on this site was copied from another comparison site, which is the shortcut that quietly propagates a stale number across a dozen domains at once.

That collection process, the ranking weights, the star ratings and the rules about what may and may not be published are all written down in full on the editorial policy and the methodology. They're public so you can disagree with them specifically — a ranking whose weighting is secret is just an opinion with a number on it.

Bank Compass is intended to be supported by Google AdSense display advertising and nothing else. Advertising is bought through Google's auction; this site has no relationship with the advertisers, no say in which ads appear, and no way to be paid more for ranking one bank above another.

That separation is the point, and it's the reason this site doesn't take affiliate commissions. In a commission model, the products that pay the most are the products it becomes profitable to recommend, and no disclosure paragraph fully neutralizes that. The full arrangement, including what would have to change before any of it changed, is on the advertiser disclosure page.

One person: Victor Gil Vazquez. There is no newsroom, no roster of freelance contributors and no anonymous editorial “we” standing in for a team that doesn't exist. The data collection, the methodology, the code and the writing are all the same person's work, which is worth stating plainly because it's both the site's main limitation and the reason every figure can be traced to who recorded it.

Alongside Bank Compass he runs Finance In Your Pocket (financeinyourpocket.com), a library of free financial calculators for the same U.S. audience, and calculofinanciero.es, its Spanish-market counterpart.

A rate moves, a bank retires an account, a bonus expires — on a site with 470 sourced figures, some of them are wrong at any given moment, and the useful question is how fast they get fixed. If you find one, the fastest route is victanweb@gmail.com, or the contact page. Corrections to a published figure are made against the institution's own current disclosure and the verification date on the page moves with them.