How we score
Every provider in a comparison gets a score out of 10. The score is calculated by the site's code from five criteria stored in the provider's data file. Nobody types a final score by hand.
Affiliate partnerships never affect scores. The scoring code does not read whether we have a commercial relationship with a provider, and providers we do not work with are listed and scored the same way.
The five criteria
| Criterion | Weight | What we look at |
|---|---|---|
| Product quality | 40% | Price, cover and conditions compared with the other providers in the same guide. 10 is the best value in that guide, 5 is average. |
| English accessibility | 25% | 10 when the website, app, contract documents and customer support are all in English; 8 when only the contracts are French or Dutch; 6 when support is French or Dutch only; 4 when only the app or the website is in English; 0 when nothing is. |
| Service | 20% | Published contact channels and opening hours, branches where relevant, and complaint figures from official ombudsman reports when they exist. |
| Simplicity | 10% | What a newcomer needs to sign up: documents asked, whether a Belgian ID card or eID is required, and whether it can be done online. 10 is online with a passport only. |
| Digital | 5% | App quality signals we can check: online signup, eID or itsme not mandatory, mobile payments. |
Score = product × 0.40 + English × 0.25 + service × 0.20 + simplicity × 0.10 + digital × 0.05, rounded to one decimal. Each guide shows the five sub-scores and the reason behind each one under every provider.
When we cannot verify a criterion
Some providers do not publish a price, block our checks, or do not say which documents they accept. We never fill that gap with an average or a default mark. A criterion we could not verify on the check date is left out of the calculation, and the score is the weighted average of the criteria we did verify, with their weights scaled up to 100%.
Example: if the price (40%) and English (25%) are verified but the other three are not, the verified criteria carry 65% of the weight. Product then counts for 0.40 / 0.65 = 62% of the score and English for 38%.
If the verified criteria carry less than 60% of the total weight, we do not rate the provider: it appears in the table as "Not enough verified data to rate", after the ranked providers, and it is not ranked. Each provider's score breakdown shows which criteria were verified and the share of the weight they carry.
The order of the providers in every guide, and the text that describes them, follow this ranking automatically: the site will not build if a page states a rank that the data no longer supports.
Where the facts come from
- Prices and conditions: the provider's own website, on the date shown. If a price is not published, we write "check current price" instead of estimating it.
- Regulatory status: the National Bank of Belgium and FSMA registers, and the European Banking Authority register for firms licensed elsewhere in the EU.
- Rules and rates: official sources only (federal and regional administrations, the Moniteur belge).
Updates
Each guide shows the date its figures were checked. When a source changes, the data file is updated and the score recalculates. If you spot something out of date, tell us.