THOUSANDS of customers are ditching Scottish banks following a wave of providers cutting interest rates, reducing perks and axing bank branches.
Scots banks have been amongst the hardest hit as current account users swap to others providing a more favourable service.
The Royal Bank of Scotland group, including NatWest and Ulster Bank tops the list of losers with a net loss of 27,107 accounts in the three months to September 30, 2016. Over 15,000 of those were NatWest customers.
Barclays recorded a net loss of 21,008, while other Scots banks that faired badly included the Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banking Group which saw a switching loss of 7,716.
It comes as it was estimated that Britain's biggest banks were axing an average of eight branches per week - leaving many communities without face-to-face banking.
One study found that some 437 branches are set to close this year on top of 1,420 branch closures already announced over the past two years.
RBS, which included NatWest, was closing the biggest number of branches this year , at 158, while Lloyds, which owns Bank of Scotland and Halifax , had announced 100 closures between July and October.
Clydesdale and Yorkshire was axing 79, HSBC 62, and TSB 38. Several current account perks were made less generous by providers around the end of 2016 and the start of 2017.
In August 2016, Santander announced that a three percent rate on its flagship 123 current account would be halved to 1.5 percent from November 1 2016. It said the changes were due to "the market expectation of interest rates staying lower for longer".
Other cuts that have since come into place include Lloyds Bank cutting a rate from four percent to two percent and TSB reducing a rate from five percent to three percent. Halifax dropped its £5 monthly reward payment on its Reward current account to £3 in February.
Tesco Bank has bucked the downward trend by guaranteeing to maintain a three percent rate until April 1 2019, while Nationwide Building Society continues to offer a five percent rate.
Earlier this month RBS and NatWest decided to slash the rate of cashback for Reward current accounts customers from three percent to two percent from June.
They are also introducing a hefty minimum monthly deposit requirement of £1,500 for new customers.
RBS said: “There has been a significant reduction in the number of people switching away from us. We are constantly looking to improve our service to customers. We recently introduced a new feedback system to listen directly to our customers and act on their feedback. Our Reward account is our fastest growing, with over 1.7m customers benefitting from over £100m in Rewards since it launched. We also offer a market leading, award winning mobile app used by over 4.5million customers.”
According to the the UK, some 248,302 switches took place between January and March 2017 according to payments body Bacs, which oversees the current account switch service.
This was higher than the 208,387 switches that took place between October and December 2016.
Figures from current account providers in Bacs' report also show the biggest winners were Halifax, which made a net gain of more than 28,000 current accounts being switched to it between July and September 2016.
Santander made a net gain of over 26,000 switches over the same period, despite August's announcement about its rate cut, while Nationwide gained just under 26,000 switches net. The Co-op and Tesco also made net gains in current account switches over this period.
Several current account perks were made less generous by providers around the end of 2016 and the start of 2017.
In total, more than 3.7 million current accounts have been switched since the seven-day service to make it easier for customers to ditch and switch was launched in September 2013.
Over the last 12 months, 949,047 switches were completed, which is down on the 1,061,144 in the previous 12 months.
But the figures show that current account switching has been creeping up this year so far. Nearly 96,000 switches took place last month and around 90,000 switches were made in February, compared with just under 62,000 in January.
Bacs said awareness levels of the current account switch service reached a new record high of 79% in March - representing an increase of 21 percentage points since its launch.
A Clydesdale spokesman said: "Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banks has around 1.7 million current account customers. Whilst we are naturally always disappointed to lose any customer, these figures represent a very small fraction of our total number of current accounts."
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