About the New York Bank Ratings Index

When this website was initially developed in 2017, it used 20 categories to provide rankings on 19 different banks throughout New York. Since then, it has been overhauled and updated to include data for 28 traditional banks in addition to 8 Fintech banks or financial services. After a user assigns weights to these categories indicating his or her personal preferences with respect to those categories, the user can generate a list of best banks for that individual.

New York State is one of the financial capitals of the world, and individual consumers of banking services have a wide range of commercial banks to choose from, all of which provide a dizzying array of products and services. With the details of many of these products and services buried in the fine print of consumer agreements or in the back pages of bank websites, the consumer is sometimes at a loss when choosing which bank to use as their primary bank when looking to open a checking account, use an ATM, send a remittance, or open a credit card account.

The New York Bank Ratings Index (NYBRI) attempts to take some of the guesswork out of choosing a bank. It evaluates the twenty-eight largest banks in New York State along twenty consumer-focused categories and awards points under each category based on how well the banks meet consumer need in each particular category. The index then ranks the banks by giving a cumulative score under each category and lists them out highest to lowest.

Accompanying this site is a report that provides background information on the NYBRI, explains the process by which we completed the ranking and scoring for the twenty-eight largest banks serving individual bank customers in New York State, scores the banks and offers the final ranking, and then supplies the individualized data for each bank in an appendix to that report.

Consumers can also use this site to create a customized index and ranking based on their own preferences in terms of the categories to use in scoring the banks and the relative weights to assign these categories.

As a complement to the report and our ranking, this site offers New Yorkers the opportunity to review the products and services of the twenty-eight largest banks servicing individual consumers throughout the state. Individuals can also customize this bank ranking index to reflect their own interests by selecting the categories they would like to include in their own index and then weighting those categories in accordance with their relative importance to the individual.

The first thing for the customer to do is select the categories that he or she wants to include in the customized ranking. Next, apply a percentage weight (out of 100) to give to each category. Finally, apply the categories and their weights to the final score to generate a ranking of the twenty-eight banks based on the customer’s own ranking index. Through this process, consumers can generate their own, customized ranking that reflects the products and services that are the most important to them.

We used the following categories when creating our bank rating system:

• Number of Branch Locations
• Distribution of Branch Locations
• Online Banking Availability
• Fee for Outside ATMS
• Checking Account Fees (basic level or checkless checking account)
• Savings Account Fees (basic level account)
• Overdraft Practices
• Overdraft Charges and Limits
• Credit Cards (basic secured, as compared to APR range)
• Credit Card Fees
• Acceptance of Alternative Forms of Identification
• Cost of Wire Transfers
• Loan Origination Market Share (Percentage of Total Lending Volume in New York State)
• Loan Acceptance Rate in New York State
• Loan Acceptance Rate for Latino Borrowers
• Loan Acceptance Rate for Black Borrowers
• Loan Acceptance Rate for Low- and Moderate-Income Borrowers
• Percentage of Loans Made to Low- and Moderate-Income Borrowers
• Acceptance Rate for Low- and Moderate-Income Communities
• Percentage of Loans Made to Communities of Color

For a complete description of each of these categories, please read the NYBRI Report or refer to the Bank Ratings Methodology or the Fintech Ratings Methodology. The 2017 version of the NYBRI report is also available online and can be viewed or downloaded as a PDF.

Website Contributions

This website was designed by the University at Albany of the State University of New York's Informatics students Isadora Morandi Cabrera, James Corona, Oleg Balitskiy & Youngwoo Kim, under the supervision of professor Christopher Velez. The content for the site was developed by Albany Law Students Jocelynn Buti, Emily Gerace-Gaylord, Alex Gugie, Shaniece Hunter, Jake Penman, and Matthew Ricupero, with guidance and Assistance by Professor Ray Brescia; and University at Albany Master’s Student Reilly B. Coleman, with guidance and assistance by Professor Shobha Chengalur-Smith and Assistant Professor Yeasung Jeong.