Why Aren’t I Seeing My Favorite Banking Option in My Search Results?
Answering a common question about the Better Banking Options search engine
First, try increasing the number of banks and credit unions displayed in your search results. Each search initially shows five institutions, but you can load additional results by clicking the plus sign at the bottom of the list.
If your favorite banking option still doesn’t appear—or has a lower score than you expected—it may come down to the specific metric we use to evaluate institutions.
When we first started Better Banking Options, we primarily featured banks and credit unions with community development designations or strong missions focused on serving underserved populations. But we realized many people don’t have institutions like that nearby, and we wanted to create a tool that could compare all banking options in a city or neighborhood—including both banks and credit unions.
To do this, we developed a scoring system based on publicly available lending and branch data. Our search engine prioritizes institutions that:
Make significant small business loans
Invest heavily in housing lending
Serve low- and moderate-income communities
Maintain local branch networks
Keep a high percentage of deposits circulating through loans
In other words, we look for banks and credit unions that actively reinvest in their communities through lending and neighborhood presence.
If your favorite bank or credit union doesn’t score especially well, there could be several reasons. Some institutions focus on alternative forms of lending or financial services that aren’t fully reflected in publicly available data. Others may simply be too small to generate large lending volumes compared to other institutions. In some cases, banks may offer excellent customer service or strong financial products while still doing relatively little community development lending.
A lower score doesn’t necessarily mean an institution is “bad,” and you may know important things about your bank that our metric cannot currently measure. However, it does suggest it may be worth doing additional research to better understand how your deposits are being used. (And if you’d like help with that research, feel free to contact us.)
The bottom line?
The goal of the Better Banking Options search engine isn’t to tell you what bank you must use—it’s to help you make more informed decisions about where your money goes. Banking is one of the easiest ways to support the kinds of communities and economic values you care about. Our search engine helps make those comparisons easier by letting you see and evaluate all of your banking options in one place.
👉 Explore your local banking options and compare institutions using our search engine.
