They find their bank too expensive, and they stay anyway. For the first wave of the Nabel Financial Services Tracker, we interviewed 274 people who run their household’s finances, all of them in a voice interview with the Nabel agent.
Tracker
Loyal by DefaultFinancial Services · France
Sept 2026 fieldwork · 274 respondents · 16 min median interview
Unhappy with the price, and staying anyway.
86%
won’t switch their main bank in the next twelve months, 70% certainly not. So do 83% of those who find their fees too high.
54%
find their bank fees too high: 63% of traditional-bank customers, against 10% of those whose main bank is online.
37%
also bank somewhere else, often an online account used as a wallet. 82% keep a traditional bank as their main bank.
48%
would take advice from an AI as long as they stay in control: no payments, no decisions. 28% want no AI at all.
For a 90-cent overdraft, they wanted to open an over-indebtedness file on me. […] Card fraud. They emptied my account. […] I had to wait three weeks to get my money back.
Woman, 35–54, talking to the Nabel agent · quote translated from French, audio shortened
Methodology
Mainland France · 11–16 Sept 2026
274
respondents who hold a bank account in their own name and make their household’s financial decisions
204
complete voice interviews with the Nabel agent, plus 70 partial ones kept question by question
16 min
median length of a complete interview
5 days
of fieldwork.
Why they stay, and what would make them leave
The full report goes further. 29 pages, in French:
- 6 findings on loyalty, fees, fraud, online banks, money worries and AI
- Three customers’ stories, and their own words transcribed word for word
- 3 opportunities for traditional banks, online banks and neobanks, and AI projects in banking and insurance
- The interview guide and the full methodology