Where five billion people bank

The five largest retail banks in each of the ten most populous countries, and where their customers actually log in.

The finding. Of the fifty in the roster, twenty-three are majority state-owned and nine run Islamic banking, so the interface most of these customers meet for money is more often a government product than a commercial one. The ten countries hold 4.66 billion people between them — India and China alone are 2.87 billion — which is the reason for choosing them and the reason the sample is not a survey of good banking interfaces.

45 of the 50 in the roster are shown: the ones whose own page was measured. 5 are not — Janata Bank, Sberbank, VTB, Alfa-Bank, Promsvyazbank (PSB). Janata closes the connection, to an automated browser and an ordinary one alike. The four Russian banks all fail the same way — a certificate authority a default browser does not trust, and a warning this collection does not click through. Sanctions are not usually described as an interface property. For a customer outside Russia they are the whole interface.

11 sites would not show an automated browser their real page — an “Access Denied” page, a Cloudflare check, an empty shell, a notice that the browser is out of date or that the site has moved, a redirect mid-measure — and were measured with the same function in an ordinary Chrome instead, marked in Chrome on their card. 10 of them had been published before that from the block page the script was served, which is a measurement of a bank's security vendor, not of its bank. They are corrected, and say so.

Source. national banking regulators, audited annual reports, The Banker · public filings and published rankings · retrieved 2026-08-27. This collection is derived · phase 1, roster only.