A Guaranteed Switch: How the UK Made Changing Banks Effortless
- Stephen Dawkins
- Mar 31
- 5 min read
I was recently in London for Finovate when a friend of mine mentioned that they were switching their primary bank account for a better rate. I knew this person to be very financially savvy and dare I say frugal. But even then, I was stunned by her tenacity. “I’m sorry, you do it every few years???” She must be joking.
She wasn’t.
In the United States, switching banks feels like breaking up with a gym. You start with great intentions, you think about it for months, and when you finally do it, you're still charged a monthly fee three years later for a checking account you forgot to close. Switching accounts means updating your direct deposit with HR, manually moving every bill or subscription, waiting for transfers to clear, and praying nothing bounces in between. So, like many Americans, I just didn’t switch, at least not my main account.
But as my friend pointed out, in the UK, they have a system called CASS—the UK’s Current Account Switch Service—and soon, I would come to learn about what could be.
In the UK with CASS, switching bank accounts is designed to be painless. All you have to do when choose a new bank is let them know you want to switch using the Current Account Switch Service. That’s it. You don’t need to contact your old bank, your utility providers, or your employer—your new bank handles the rest.
Once you agree to the switch, you pick a switch date, usually within the next seven working days. Behind the scenes, your new bank coordinates with your old one to:
Move over all your direct debits and standing orders (think: rent, phone bill, Netflix),
Redirect incoming payments like your paycheck,
And close your old account on the agreed switch date.
Behind the scenes, the new bank communicates with the old to collect any active direct debits and incoming credits and transfers the information to the new bank’s system.
But wait…. You might be thinking, wouldn’t the company that I pay a subscription need to know which bank to pull from? Yes, they do need to know, and yes it automatically changes.
When the banks make the change for you, they send the information through Bacs (the UK Automatic Clearing House similar to ACH in the US). Bacs then sends out a notification via the Automatic Direct Debit Amendment Notifications (ADDACs) that then notifies all vendors that you pay or get paid by.
Even after the switch, if someone accidentally sends money to your old account, it will be automatically redirected to your new one for up to three years.
And in the rare case something goes wrong? The service includes a Switch Guarantee—meaning the bank is required to fix any errors and cover any costs you incur.
It’s not just customer-friendly—it’s frictionless by design. The kind of friction that, let’s be honest, many U.S. banks depend on to keep you from walking away.
How Did the UK Pull This Off?
The short version: regulators got involved.
After the 2008 financial crisis, the UK government created the Independent Commission on Banking to evaluate how to make banking safer and more competitive. One of the interesting things that came out of their report was that people weren’t switching banks, and big banks had little reason to improve service. So, the Commission proposed a remedy: a switching service that was free, fast, and reliable. The major UK banks were told, essentially, “You’re going to build this. And fund it.”
And so, in 2013, CASS was launched. It’s managed by Pay.UK, the same folks behind the UK’s Faster Payments system. Since then, over 9 million switches have been completed. And it’s not just the legacy banks benefiting— you could argue that challenger banks like Monzo and Starling owe much of their growth to the ease of switching.
Why Doesn’t the U.S. Have This?
Fair question. The answer is a classic cocktail of American financial complexity: some legacy tech, a dash of fragmented regulation, and a healthy pour of institutional inertia.
First, the U.S. banking system is huge and decentralized. Thousands of banks and credit unions in different states run on different systems. There’s no single governing body like Pay.UK that could mandate a nationwide switch service. In the US we have NACHA, which sets rules for ACH transactions, but nothing to force banks to adopt a similar framework to CASS.
And that’s probably important because secondly, the U.S. banks simply don’t want it. Why would they make it easier for you to leave? They all want the benefit of bringing in new customers but not if they have to make sure their products are good enough to keep people. I’ve seen multiple banks emulate a service like this of their own, only to produce a sad sheet of paper to fill out the auto payments that you remember.
Currently, if you look up bank switching in the US, you will get bank web pages that say it’s “easy” with these steps. 1. Open new bank account. 2. Switch over your Payments yourself. Just draw the rest of the fucking owl.
And finally, let’s be honest—consumer pressure just hasn’t been there. Most Americans either don’t know there’s a better way, or have accepted that switching banks is supposed to be hard. We rely on apps to paper over the mess, but underneath, it’s still the same clunky foundation.
Just Good Enough?
In a way, this mirrors what we’ve seen with other financial tools. The rest of the world builds infrastructure—SEPA, IBANs, real-time bank transfers. The U.S. builds apps—Plaid, Venmo, etc.— working around a system instead of fixing it.
CASS might not sound revolutionary, but it quietly changed the incentives in UK banking. When customers can leave as easily as they can join, banks have to compete on more than just branding and inertia. They have to actually offer something… good.
And while this post was about CASS in the UK, it’s worth mentioning they aren’t alone. There are similar systems across the EU, including Germany and the Netherlands. And it goes beyond the EU. Australia, starting in 2019, has been working building the infrastructure to do this as well.
And that’s something worth thinking about the next time your bank charges you $20 “maintenance fee” to hold your money and says, “You could always switch.”
If only it were that easy.
