How this desk ranks anything, and what it refuses to rank on

Everything published here is written by one desk. There is no reporter list, no contributor network and no editor above it, and the byline says desk rather than a name because the name would tell you nothing you could check.

What you can check is the method. Every ranking on this site is rebuilt from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's public complaint database, pulled through the public API rather than copied from anybody's summary, and the query behind each table is described in the article that uses it. The pull date sits under every figure. If a number here disagrees with a number somewhere else, run the query.

We do not rank on monthly fee, signup bonus or interface quality. Those are the four things every other comparison ranks on and three of them are advertising. We rank on what the record shows a company did when a customer had a problem, because that is the only variable in the set that is measured by somebody other than the company.

There are no affiliate links anywhere on this site, no sponsored placements, and no provider has ever paid to appear or to be removed. Nothing here is advice about your own arrangements, and where the sums are large the question belongs with an accountant or a lawyer who can read your actual agreement.

Errors get corrected in the article that carried them, with the correction at the top rather than in a footnote, and the old figure left visible so you can see what changed. That has happened more than once and it will happen again.