Source Policy

Last verified: September 2026 · Sources: Source Policy

Last reviewed: September 2026

1. Why this page exists

Financial content fails in a specific way. It is rarely wrong about arithmetic. It goes wrong because a figure was copied from a page that was itself copied from somewhere else, and by the fourth reproduction nobody can say who first measured it or when.

Deposit protection limits, lending caps, licensing thresholds and complaint procedures are all set by identifiable institutions and published in identifiable documents. There is no reason to cite anything other than those documents. This page states what we accept, what we refuse, and how we handle the cases where two official sources disagree.

2. Source hierarchy

When we make a factual claim, it rests on a source from this list. Sources higher on the list always win.

Rank	Source type	Examples
1	Primary law and regulation	Statutes, statutory instruments, central bank rulebooks, deposit guarantee scheme legislation
2	Regulator publications	OCC, FDIC, NCUA, Federal Reserve, FCA, PRA, OSFI, BaFin, APRA and their state equivalents
3	The institution's own disclosure	A bank's published fee schedule, terms, rate card or licence register entry
4	Official statistics	National statistical agencies, central bank data releases
5	Reputable secondary reporting	Established financial press, used only to locate a primary source, never as the source itself

Rank 5 deserves a note. We may read a news report to learn that a rule changed. We do not cite the report. We go to the rule, read it, and cite that. The report is a lead, not evidence.

3. What we refuse to use

These are not used as sources for any factual claim, regardless of how widely they are repeated:

• Other comparison and directory sites. If a competitor states a figure without naming an authority, we treat it as unverified and go to the authority ourselves.
• Content generated by a language model and published without citations. Fluency is not evidence, and a model will produce a confident wrong figure as readily as a right one.
• Bank marketing material used as a source for anything other than what that bank says about its own product. It is never used to establish a market-wide rate or a rule.
• Forum and social media posts. Useful for finding out which questions people are asking. Never used to answer them.
• Undated pages. A figure with no date cannot be checked for staleness, so it cannot be verified.
• Aggregator sites of unknown origin that publish rate tables with no methodology.

4. How a claim gets a date

Every reference page on this site carries a verification date. It means something specific, and it is not the date the page was written or the date it was edited for style.

A page can be edited many times without its verification date changing — correcting a typo, improving a sentence, or adding a link does not re-verify a figure. The date moves only when the underlying facts were actually re-checked against the authority.

When a verification date is more than twelve months old on a page carrying a regulatory figure, we treat the page as needing review and prioritise it. Where a rule is known to change frequently, the interval is shorter — see the review schedule on the editorial policy.

5. When two official sources disagree

This happens more than most readers would expect, particularly with deposit protection and lending limits. Our order of resolution:

1. 1
   Check whether they are answering different questionsMost apparent conflicts are a statute and a regulator summary describing different scopes — for example, a limit that applies per institution versus per ownership category.
2. 2
   Prefer the more specific sourceA regulator's rulebook beats a general information page. A statute beats both.
3. 3
   Prefer the more recent sourceWhere two documents genuinely conflict, the later one generally reflects the current position.
4. 4
   State the conflict on the pageIf it cannot be resolved from primary documents, we say so plainly and describe both positions rather than picking one silently.
5. 5
   Remove the claim if it cannot be settledA page without a figure is better than a page with a confidently wrong one.

6. How we use official links

Directory pages link directly to the regulator that supervises the institutions listed. These are not affiliate links and carry no commercial relationship. They are there so a reader can verify a licence, check a complaint route, or confirm a protection limit without taking our word for it.

We check these links resolve. A dead link to a regulator is a broken promise, and we treat it as a defect rather than an inconvenience.

7. Corrections

If a figure on this site is wrong, the correction process is described in full in the editorial policy. The short version: tell us, we check it against the primary source, we fix it and we say what changed. Material corrections are noted rather than made silently.

8. What this policy does not claim

See also: Editorial Policy · Methodology · Affiliate Disclosure · About