Communications initiative: Bank of Israel’s equalizer

With the goal of enabling people to make more informed financial decisions, the Bank of Israel created a suite of dashboards on its website between 2022 and 2024. These visual tools provide updated data and graphs for consumers to compare banking services across key Israeli banks easily. The initiative has played a role in enhancing the public’s financial awareness and decision-making, as well as bolstering transparency and competition in the banking sector.

The Bank of Israel started the initiative by sharing monthly updates on deposit rates offered by local banks, before gradually expanding its offerings to include housing loan interest rates, data from banks’ financial reports – such as their liquidity and capital-adequacy levels – and customers’ satisfaction ratings of the lenders.

The central bank continued with its efforts to upgrade its online resources for consumers despite the Israel-Hamas conflict that broke out in October 2023. Faced with tremendous uncertainty amid the conflict, the bank has managed to take swift and effective decisions to maintain financial and price stability, while demonstrating a strong commitment to achieving its longer-term strategic goals – including strengthening protection for bank customers through robust transparency efforts.

Dashboards for banking data comparison

In 2022, as the Bank of Israel began raising interest rates to curb inflation, staff from its banking supervision department noticed there was a widening gap between the lending rates and the deposit rates offered by banks to households. Noa Granot, head of data management at the banking supervision department, says her team felt at the time that they needed to put consumers in a stronger position.

The bank decided to work on something few others in the central banking community had done – developing a centralised, public data hub where consumers can find out the best lending and deposit rates for households in the market. It launched the data service on its website in October 2022, where it provides monthly updates on interest rates reported by individual banks. Using simple graphs and interactive charts, the dashboard also allows consumers to track a few additional data points such as the average and median deposit and lending rates offered by banks, and interest rates charged by credit card companies on postponed payments.

Building on its previous efforts, the Bank of Israel launched a second dashboard in July 2023, which primarily allows users to compare interest rates on housing loans. The dashboard also provides other metrics for more in-depth comparison, such the average internal rates of return on a mortgage loan. “The mortgage market in Israel is very complex; it’s not like the market in the US or the UK, where most mortgages have a flat interest rate,” says Uri Barazani, chief of staff and strategic planning at the banking supervision department. “So, giving customers a transparent tool to handle, let’s say, the biggest financial deal they have in their life, is a life-changer for some of them.”

Granot says there was anecdotal evidence suggesting the two dashboards had helped consumers strike better deals with banks. “We know from stories and from different people that the tools really helped them to negotiate,” she says. In one case, a bank customer managed to negotiate for a deposit rate that was two percentage points higher than the initial offer, after they pointed to a better rate offered by the same bank as shown on the dashboard, Granot says.

“One of the best ways to promote competition in the banking system is by providing each individual client with information and data that will allow them to become a stronger client who can effectively negotiate with a bank and receive better financial offers,” says Nurit Felter Eitan, head of the communications division.

In this spirit, the bank’s communications division spearheaded the launch of a mini website called ‘The Bank of Israel equalizer’ in July 2023. Situated within the central bank website, the mini site is a one-stop platform highlighting the bank’s online resources for bank customers. It directs users to the new dashboards for interest rate comparison and features some useful guides on various financial products and services, such as how to invest in a mutual fund or open a joint account.

Later in July 2023, the banking supervision department developed a third dashboard allowing people to gauge and compare the financial health of different banks based on data the banks provided in their financial reports. Some of the key data featured in this tool includes measures of the banks’ liquidity, capital adequacy, profitability and credit risk. The tool is more tailored to those who are interested in taking a deeper look into the banks’ performance, such as researchers, journalists and students.

In December 2024, the Bank of Israel rolled out two additional dashboards on its website to provide further guidance for customers to evaluate the services of different banks and credit card companies. One dashboard allows users to compare data such as the average waiting time at a bank branch, customer ratings of the bank’s service quality and their overall satisfaction ratings of the bank. This data was collected and analysed from surveys the banking supervision department carried out annually with bank customers, including households and business owners.

The other new dashboard, the ‘bank comparison dashboard’, enables users to find out the best interest rates offered by banks, their service fees, the location of bank branches and ATMs, as well as customers’ satisfaction ratings of bank services. On top of a web version, the central bank has also developed a mobile version for this tool to make it more convenient for users.

Data provided by the Bank of Israel suggests the suite of visual tools has attracted considerable usage over the past two years, with a notable rise in page views since August 2024 – after the bank stepped up promoting the tools to the media and the public. The interest rate dashboard, the bank’s first and most popular tool, had more than 64,000 users and more than 100,000 views in 2024. The latest ‘bank comparison dashboard’, meanwhile, secured more than 4,000 users and 6,000 views in just around two weeks since its launch in mid-December 2024.

Granot says her team is planning to launch in early 2025 a dashboard focusing on credit card companies’ financial health, using data from their financial reports. They also plan to launch a new dashboard enabling small and medium-sized businesses to compare lending rates offered by different banks this year.

Further down the road, Granot says Bank of Israel is considering making it even easier for the public to find out key information about banking services with AI tools. This way, people can simply ask questions and receive answers using AI, without having to navigate between graphs.

The Central Banking Awards 2025 were written by Christopher Jeffery, Daniel Hinge, Daniel Blackburn, Joasia Popowicz, Riley Steward, Jimmy Choi, Levente Koroes, Thomas Chow and Blake Evans-Pritchard.