Founder and editor
Victor Gil Vazquez
Builds and maintains Bank Compass, and personally verifies every figure in its catalog against a primary source.
Background
I'm Victor Gil Vazquez. I build and run Bank Compass on my own — the data model, the comparison tools, the rankings and the writing. There is no newsroom behind this site and no team of contributors: when a page says a savings account pays 4.10% APY, I am the person who opened the bank's own rate disclosure, read it, recorded the number, dated it and linked it.
That hands-on data work is the whole point of the site, and it's the part most comparison pages skip. The usual shortcut in this industry is to copy figures from another aggregator, which quietly propagates whatever that aggregator got wrong six months ago. Bank Compass doesn't have a single number taken from another comparison site. Every rate, fee, bonus and limit traces back to the institution that sets it or to the federal body that publishes it — the FDIC's institution directory, the Federal Reserve's large-bank release, the CFPB's regulations, the IRS's contribution limits, or the issuer's own disclosure page. Each one carries the date it was last checked, visible on the page, so you can tell at a glance whether you're reading something current or something stale.
I've been building and publishing financial tools on the web for years. Alongside Bank Compass I run Finance In Your Pocket, a library of free financial calculators for a U.S. audience, and Calculo Financiero, its Spanish-market counterpart. The work is the same in all three: take a decision people actually have to make with their own money, find the authoritative numbers behind it, and lay them out so the trade-off is visible instead of buried.
The reason I started Bank Compass is that comparing U.S. bank accounts is genuinely worse than it should be. The information exists — it's public, it's regulated, it's disclosed — but it's spread across hundreds of PDFs and fee schedules written to be technically complete rather than readable. Pulling it into one place where you can put two banks side by side, see the same fields for both, and click through to the source for each one is not a clever idea. It's just work nobody had done in a form I wanted to use.
What he's responsible for here
- Building the verified data model behind the site: 10 banks, 28 deposit accounts, 41 credit cards, plus mortgage, loan, insurance, brokerage and student-lender records, every field carrying its own source URL and verification date.
- Reading and normalizing U.S. bank disclosures — fee schedules, Truth in Savings rate sheets, cardholder agreements — into fields that can actually be compared across institutions.
- Designing the ranking methodology and the star ratings, and documenting them publicly so anyone can check whether they agree with the weighting.
- Writing the guides, which stick to explaining mechanics you can verify rather than making predictions about rates nobody can make.
- 115
- Products tracked
- 470
- Sourced data points
- 64
- Distinct sources cited
- 2026-08-09
- Last verification
What he is not
- I am not a licensed financial advisor, a certified financial planner, a broker, a tax professional or an attorney, in the United States or anywhere else. Nothing on this site is personalized financial advice, and it isn't written for your specific situation because I don't know your specific situation.
- I don't work for, and have never worked for, any bank, card issuer, lender, insurer or brokerage featured on this site. Bank Compass has no affiliate links, no referral fees and no paid placements — see the advertiser disclosure for exactly how the site is funded.
- I'm based in Spain and Bank Compass covers U.S. products. That's a real limitation and I'd rather state it than let it be discovered: I'm not walking into branches in Ohio. What I do instead is work exclusively from the disclosures U.S. institutions are legally required to publish, which is the same material a U.S.-based researcher would be reading.
How to check any of this
Everything above is meant to be verifiable rather than taken on trust. The two sites linked from this page are live and run by the same person, the email address is monitored and answered, and the rules this site holds itself to are written out in full rather than summarized:
- Editorial policy — sourcing rules, verification cadence, corrections, and the disclosure on how these pages are produced.
- Methodology — the exact weights behind every ranking and star rating on the site.
- Advertiser disclosure — where the money comes from, and what it is not allowed to touch.
- Legal notice — full legal identity and registered details of the site owner.
Guides by this author
Everything on the site carries the same byline. These are the four to start with.
- What Is APY, and Why It Matters More Than the Interest RateAPY (Annual Percentage Yield) is the actual return you'll earn on a savings account in a year, including compounding. It's the number to compare — not the interest rate alone.Guide · 3 min read
- How to Choose a Checking Account Without Overpaying in FeesMost checking account fees are avoidable — but only if you actually meet the condition the bank sets. Here's how to check before you open an account, not after the first fee posts.Guide · 3 min read
- Why a 700 Credit Score Isn't as Good as You Think700 sounds like a strong number because it looks like a school grade out of 100. On a scale that runs to 850 it is squarely mid-table — and the gap between mid-table and excellent is measured in the rate you are offered, every time you borrow.Guide · 4 min read
- What Is the FDIC, and Is Your Money Actually Insured?The FDIC insures deposits at member banks up to $250,000 per depositor, per insured bank, for each account ownership category. Those three qualifiers are the whole rule — and they are also how a household can be covered for far more than $250,000 at one bank.Guide · 4 min read