App-based current accounts, assessed on deposit-protection disclosure
The feature lists are excellent and largely interchangeable. Assessed on the question they answer least clearly: which entity holds your money, and what protects it.
App-based accounts have won on product. Onboarding is faster, notifications are better, budgeting tools are genuinely useful, and foreign-exchange pricing is generally clearer than the incumbents managed for decades.
None of that is what this desk assesses. We assess what a firm discloses, and on the question that matters most — what happens to your money if the firm fails — the segment’s disclosure quality varies far more than its feature lists do.
The question, broken into parts
Rows three and four are the crux, and the distinction is not widely understood. Safeguarding under an e-money permission is a real protection — customer funds are held separately from the firm’s own — but it is a different mechanism from deposit protection, with different consequences and timescales if the firm fails. Neither arrangement is improper. They are simply not the same, and a customer who assumes one while holding the other has misunderstood their position.
What the better firms do
They name the holding entity plainly, in language a non-specialist can follow, rather than leaving it to be inferred from a footer.
They state which protection applies, name the scheme, and state its limit — and say which entity the limit attaches to.
They distinguish between products within one app. A single app may hold a current account with one status and a savings or investment product with another. Firms that separate these clearly are doing something genuinely useful.
They explain the shared-licence position, where a brand operates under another firm’s authorisation, since that determines whether a customer’s protection limit is shared across brands they thought were separate.
Firms doing all four exist. Reading a dozen sets of terms, the gap between the clearest and the vaguest is wide, and it does not track brand size.
Where the segment falls short
Marketing pages rarely address it. The information is in the terms; the decision is made on the marketing.
Group structures obscure the answer. Where several brands sit under one authorisation, or a consumer brand is a distributor for a licensed institution, establishing which entity holds the money requires effort most customers will not make.
“Your money is safe” is used loosely, without naming the mechanism. It may be entirely accurate and it tells the customer nothing checkable.
Feature launches outpace disclosure updates, so a new product can appear in an app before the terms clearly describe its status.
How to find the answer in about five minutes
Because the information is generally published and generally not where people look, the practical route is worth setting out.
Open the app’s terms and conditions rather than its marketing pages, and search for the words “authorised”, “safeguard” and the name of the compensation scheme. The holding entity is usually named in the first few clauses, and its permission type is usually stated alongside. Then take that entity name — not the brand name — to the FCA Register and read what its entry covers.
If the app offers several products, repeat for each: a current account and a savings or investment product in the same app can sit with different entities under different arrangements, and the app’s own interface rarely signals the change.
We do not assert firms’ permissions and would not want a reader to take our word for any of this — the point of the exercise is that the reader ends up looking at the register themselves.
Pros and cons
Verdict
Our assessment is that this segment’s disclosure problem is one of placement rather than concealment. The material is generally published; it is simply not where the decision is made. Before moving a meaningful balance into an app-based account, find the named entity holding the money, find which protection applies and its limit, and check whether other brands you use share the same authorisation.
We do not assert any firm’s permissions — check the FCA Register yourself. Fin Watch is a publisher, is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, and nothing here is financial advice.