Editorial policy

Every rate, fee, minimum, bonus, limit and rating on this site traces to one of two kinds of source: the institution that sets the number, or the federal body that publishes it. In practice that means CFPB, FDIC, Federal Reserve, Federal Student Aid, FTC, IRS, NCUA and SEC (Investor.gov), plus each bank's or issuer's own rate sheet, fee schedule and cardholder agreement — 64 distinct sources across 470 published figures, and a further 50 citations at the foot of the 27 guides.

• Never another aggregator. Not one number here was taken from a competing comparison site. Copying between aggregators is how a rate that changed in March is still being quoted in September across a dozen domains at once.
• Never a news article citing the source. If a publication reports an FDIC figure, the figure comes from the FDIC, not from the publication.
• The source link is published, not just held. It sits next to the figure on the page so you can open the document yourself, which is the only version of “sourced” that's worth anything.

A rate without a date is not information, it's a suggestion. Each field on this site stores the day it was last confirmed against its source, and that date is shown on the page rather than kept in a database. The most recent verification across the whole catalog is 2026-08-09.

Different fields move at different speeds and are re-checked accordingly: mortgage rates are the most volatile figure on the site, welcome bonuses and account opening bonuses are the most likely to expire quietly, and structural facts like an institution's FDIC certificate number effectively never change. The site sets its own freshness expectation per field rather than pretending everything was checked this morning.

When a figure can't be confirmed against a primary source, the page says “not verified yet” and leaves the space empty. It is never filled with an industry average, an estimate, a figure from a similar product, or a plausible-looking number.

This is the rule that costs the most and matters the most. A comparison table with two blanks in it looks less finished than one with numbers in every cell — and it is the only one of the two you can actually rely on, because you can tell which cells were checked.

Star ratings and “best of” positions come out of a published formula applied to verified fields. Nobody decides that a bank deserves to be first and works backwards. The weights, the scoring bands and the reason each criterion was chosen are all in the methodology, which exists so you can disagree with the weighting specifically instead of having to take the ordering on faith.

• A product with unverified fields is scored on what is verified, and the gap is visible — it never gets an assumed value that would flatter or penalize it.
• Superlative badges are only used where a ranking actually computes them. Category labels and verified facts are used everywhere else, so a badge never claims a ranking that was never run.
• The same product scores identically wherever it appears. A rating that changed depending on which page you found it on would not be a rating.

Bank Compass has no affiliate relationships, no referral agreements, no paid placements and no sponsored content with any institution featured on it. Outbound links go to the institution's own page and generate no revenue.

The site is intended to be funded by Google AdSense display advertising, bought through Google's auction. Advertisers have no contact with this site, no influence on rankings, and no way to buy any. The complete arrangement is on the advertiser disclosure page, including what disclosure would appear if that ever changed.

The guides and product analysis on this site are written and edited by Victor Gil Vazquez, who is named on every article and is the person to write to when something is wrong. Software assists with research, drafting and consistency checks across the catalog, in the same way it assists with the code — but no page is published unreviewed, and no figure reaches a page without a human opening the source document and confirming it.

That distinction is the one that matters and it's worth being explicit about: automation is used to keep 115 products consistent with each other, never to manufacture pages. Nothing here is generated in bulk to occupy a search result, and product pages are only created for products whose data has actually been verified — which is why the catalog is the size it is rather than ten times larger.

With 470figures on the site, some are wrong at any given moment. The commitment isn't that they never are — it's what happens next:

• Reports go to the email below or through the contact page, and are checked against the institution's own current disclosure, not against the report.
• A confirmed error is corrected at the source of the data, so it changes everywhere on the site at once rather than on the page that was reported.
• The verification date moves with the correction, so the page tells you it was re-checked.
• If a correction changes a ranking, the ranking is recomputed. It is not left in place to avoid the churn.

Write to victanweb@gmail.com or use the contact page.

Bank Compass explains mechanics you can verify and compares figures you can check. It does not forecast rates, recommend a product for your situation, or tell you what to do with your money — not out of caution, but because none of those can be done honestly from a page that doesn't know who's reading it.

Nothing here is financial, tax or legal advice, and the person who writes it is not a licensed advisor — stated plainly on his profile rather than buried in a footer. For a decision that turns on your own circumstances, the right move is a licensed professional who can see them.