Are my savings safe? Who owns who in the savings market?

For most people, £85,000 (from 31 December 2010) worth of savings cover will provide adequate protection. But what if you have more than this amount in savings?

Be sure to check whether your bank shares its FSA authorisation with any others, as this will affect your savings' protection

The answer is that it's vital to spread your money around, placing it with separate financial institutions so that each chunk of your cash is covered separately under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS). If you place too much money with a single institution, you could stand to lose some of it if your bank or building society went bust.

Unfortunately, it isn't always easy to spot which banks and building societies form part of the same financial institution. For example, most of us would not assume that BM Savings (Birmingham Midshires), the AA, Saga, Intelligent Finance, Bank of Scotland and Halifax are part of the same institution - but they are. 

In an example like this, you could safely hold just £85,000 of savings across all the banking brands belonging to the same institution. Saving more could put your money at unnecessary risk. To find out which banks and building societies share FSCS protection, you need to find out whether they have joint, or individual, authorisation from the Financial Services Authority (FSA)

The big brands - who do they own?

The tables below show which of the biggest financial services brands share FSA authorisation and who they are owned by. If several brands share a deposit-taking licence, you only get a total of £85,000 of FSCS protection even if you have savings with more than one of them.

Who owns who in the savings market?

This table gives a more comprehensive list of banking brands, how each of them is licensed by the FSA, and therefore whether it can offer consumers individual or joint savings protection under the FSCS.

If you see that two or more banking brands share the same banking licence, this means you cannot safely save more than £85,000 across all of them - as is the case with the savings providers mentioned in the example above.

More on this...

• Need individual help to find out who owns who in the savings market- call the Which? Money Helpline
• Find out what your savings account is currently paying by using our Savings Rate Booster
• To get the best rates on your savings - check out our Best Rate Savings tables