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5 reasons you need a backup bank account
As bank outages and cyber threats surge, Which? explains why you need a spare account and the traps to avoid before applying for one
Chiara is an award-winning investigative reporter who specialises in banking and fraud, joining Which? in 2015 following six years as a personal finance journalist at a national newspaper.
Bottled water, extra tinned food – and now a backup bank account.
That's the latest advice from the chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), who urged households to protect their money against major IT meltdowns and cyberattacks.
His warning follows widespread disruption caused by a major Google Cloud outage last month, which affected multiple UK banks, businesses and even the courts.
A recent Which? survey suggests many of us are already thinking along these lines. While 48% of adults said they have only one current account, 31% have two, 12% have three and 4% have four or more.
Here are five key reasons to consider opening a backup current account today.
1. Cyber attacks and outages
What would you do if your card suddenly stopped working or you couldn’t pay your bills?
Bank outages have become so common that the Treasury Committee wrote to nine of the largest banks and building societies in the UK to demand an explanation last year. We recently published a list of the banks with the worst tracks records and explored what’s being done to prevent future meltdowns.
Which? found 26% of people with more than one current account said this is specifically to mitigate against technical outages or account freezes.
Online card payments can also be glitchy, as 22% of current account holders told us they’ve experienced technical or operational issues during security checks in the past 12 months.
Primary issues include technical hiccups between the bank and retailer (7%), needing to phone the bank to authorise payments (6%), issues receiving passcodes (5%) and running out of time before passcodes expired (5%).
- Find out more: What to do if your banking app goes down
2. You’ve been scammed
Spreading your money across different banking groups doesn’t just help in cases of IT meltdowns. A spare account could also be a lifeline if you’re scammed and your provider needs to replace your debit card or freeze your account.
A backup bank account with an emergency balance to cover your main bills (groceries, rent or mortgage and utilities) means you won’t be completely cut off if your main account is frozen, or drained by a fraudster.
- Find out more: Scammed, abandoned, forgotten – the lasting toll of fraud
3. Budgeting benefits
Separate accounts for household bills and spare cash is one of the simplest ways to streamline your finances, ensuring you’ll always know what’s safe to spend.
If you want some help tracking your spending, the likes of Starling and Monzo are leading the pack when it comes to spending analysis tools, though high-street banks are catching up.
A packaged bank account can save you money if you already pay for travel insurance, breakdown cover and mobile phone cover separately. These offer particularly good value if opened as a joint account, meaning two people living at the same address are covered under the one fee.
Nationwide FlexPlus (£18 a month) is our pick of the bunch, though we generate individual insurance policy scores to help you choose an account that suits your specific needs.
- Find out more: best packaged bank accounts 2026
4. Face-to-face banking
Digital banking is convenient – until services crash, or you need to speak to someone in person about complex matters such as your first mortgage, or registering power of attorney.
Which? research found that 43% of adults had visited a branch within the past year, rising to 50% of 25-34-year-olds, challenging the assumption that only older people use them.
Nationwide has pledged to keep its entire network intact until at least 2030, including newly-acquired Virgin Money branches. NatWest Group has made a similar promise, albeit following a decade of over 1,500 branch closures.
Shared banking hubs are also popping up across the UK to replace lost high-street branches, where rotating staff from individual banks visit on designated days of the week for face-to-face appointments.
- Find out more: Is your local bank branch closing?
5. Superior savings
Attractive savings rates are sometimes exclusive to a bank’s existing customers. Chase, for example, has recently launched its first regular savings account paying 6.5%, though this can be beaten by linked accounts at Santander (8%) and First Direct (7%).
Challenger banks Monzo and Starling also require customers to open a current account to unlock their savings products. While these aren’t necessarily market leaders, they are integrated seamlessly into their banking apps, making them very simple and convenient to manage.
- Find out more: best savings accounts 2026
How to choose a backup bank account
It’s a good idea to spread your money across multiple banking groups, however, many institutions use the same third-party providers.
For example, cloud services in the UK financial services sector are dominated by four companies: Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle, making it difficult to avoid potential banking disruptions entirely.
There is – at present – no public register showing you which banks share third party providers. Thankfully, some banks are transparent; Starling told us it runs both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCS). Monzo also uses AWS for its main banking platform and has built a separate backup infrastructure called ‘Monzo Stand In’, which runs on GCS.
Major high-street banks tend to be more tight-lipped (none told us which companies provide their cloud services) but outages can give the game away.
Downdetector, which provides real-time monitoring of outages, said users reported issues accessing online services at HSBC, Lloyds, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Revolut during the Google Cloud outage in October 2026.
- Find out more:what to do if you bank goes down
How to manage multiple bank accounts
Before you apply for a backup bank account, there are a few downsides to consider:
- Credit score Applying for too many bank accounts in a short window can negatively affect your credit score, as applications trigger a hard credit search. Chase, Monzo and Starling conduct soft credit checks that don’t impact your credit score, provided you don’t request an arranged overdraft.
- Security checks It can be tricky to remember your security details for multiple accounts. As tempting as it might be to use the same passwords or passcodes across them all, this isn’t safe so use a password manager and built-in device biometrics (Face ID or fingerprint) instead.
- Funding conditions Some accounts require minimum monthly funding to avoid being charged a monthly fee, or demand a specific number of active Direct Debits to access perks so check the terms and conditions carefully.
- Fraud risks It can be harder to keep an eye on multiple bank statements, meaning you could miss fraudulent transactions or data breaches. If you move house, don’t forget to update your address across all of your providers or you risk new debit cards and other sensitive mail being sent to your old address and into the hands of identity thieves.
- Inactivity Don’t go overboard when opening extra accounts, as banks classify bank accounts as inactive if there are no customer transactions for an extended period of time, potentially resulting in it being frozen or restricted in some way.
On behalf of Which?, Deltapoll conducted an online survey of 2,059 members of the public on their banking habits in August 2026 (with figures representative of the UK adult population).
