2017 Digital Money Trends Report: What We Learned About Loyalty

In November, Ratehub.ca surveyed more than 1,000 Canadians to see how they interact with, and their attitudes towards, financial products and services. The results of this survey are shared in the 2017 Digital Money Trends Report.

Part of the Digital Money Trends Report examines Canadians’ loyalty to their financial institutions and how they use technology as part of their relationship with money. Here’s what we learned:

Canadians are incredibly loyal to their banks

While we get presented with an ever-growing amount of advertising for different financial products, most of us tend to stick with the familiar choice: our primary financial institution or insurance company

Approximately half of Canadian homeowners have a mortgage from the same financial institution that they use the most — for boomers the number is 43%, for generation Xers it’s 57%, with millennials in the middle at 54%.

Credit cards are another product where Canadians display a great deal of loyalty. Most than two-thirds of survey respondents hold a credit card from their primary financial institution, with the boomers being the lowest group at 66%, and the millennials in our survey replying that an incredible 82% of them had a credit card from their primary financial institution.

Approximately 60% of all Canadians purchase new insurance products from the insurance company they use the most as well.

Canadians don’t believe they are getting the best deals

While Canadians are loyal to their primary financial institution, they aren’t very confident that they’re getting the best deal for their loyalty.

We asked Canadians to tell us if they felt their primary financial institution offered the best deal for a financial product like credit cards, mortgages, insurance, savings accounts, chequing accounts, or GICs. Only a minority of respondents to our survey believed that their primary financial institution and almost 40% believe their primary financial institution would offer the best deal for any financial product.

Canadians keep their bank accounts for a very long time

The loyalty many Canadians display to their primary financial institutions seems to start very early on.

A large portion of respondents have had the same bank account for about half of their life. 56% of boomers and 28% of generation Xers have had the same back account for 21 years or longer.