The Best and Worst Banks of 2016 — What Entrepreneurs Shoul…

One of the most important decisions a small business or start-up can make is which bank to do business with. That’s because building a relationship with the right lender is critical to ensuring that your business grows and succeeds.

Related: How to Pick the Right Bank for Your Business

You want to choose a bank that focuses on small- and mid-sized businesses with offerings tailored to the needs of entrepreneurs like you. But you also want a bank with a track record for great service and happy customers.

While you may have previously relied on word of mouth to choose a bank, you don’t need to do that anymore. That’s because a recent report by LendEDU, the organization I help lead, ranks banks by the number of customer complaints against them. The data comes from from complaints tracked by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

If you’re unfamiliar with the CFPB, it’s a federal agency, created in 2010, in the wake of the Great Recession of 2007-08, with the purpose of protecting Americans when they use financial products and services.

As of July 2011, the CFPB began tracking consumer complaints against banks. Currently, the CFPB’s Consumer Complaint Database has received more than 679,000 complaints against about 3,000 financial companies.

LendEDU’s analysis of banks in 2016 looked at 175,051 complaints in the CFPB database between January 1, 2016, and December 10, 2016. In total, the report featured 57 financial institutions included on the S&P Banks Select Industry Index.

The report included both regional banks and larger, diversified ones. Because the size of the banks varies significantly, the report calculated the number of complaints relative to the value of deposits held at the banks.

In that way, the data could reveal which banks had the most unhappy customers and which had the least.

The best banks

Of the banks that the report looked at, there were 12 that did not have a single complaint against them; these included the Bank of the Ozarks, United Bank, Silicon Valley Bank and Bank of Hope. While that doesn’t guarantee that all these institutions’ customers were satisfied, it does mean that none of these customers were angry enough to go online and lodge a complaint with the federal agency.

One thing that’s interesting about the banks without complaints is that they’re all regional banks. They are also relatively small banks. Silicon Valley Bank tops that “smallest” list, with only a little more than $38 billion in deposits. Centennial Bank comes in last, with just $6.8 billion in deposits.

Related: 6 Steps to Avoid Becoming the Victim of ‘Advance-Fee’ Fraud

The worst banks

The top ten worst banks, according to customer complaints, reads like a who’s who of big banks in America. The list has Citigroup coming in as second worst; Wells Fargo, coming in third; Bank of America, fifth; U.S. Bancorp, sixth; and Citizens Financial Group, holding the eighth spot. All of these banks are major diversified banks, but there were also a number of regional banks that made the list.

In fact, TCF National Bank came in with the most complaints. TCF National had over 12 complaints per billion dollars in deposits.

In contrast, Citigroup, ranked the second worst bank, received just over eight complaints per billion dollars of deposits. Other regional banks on the list included SunTrust Bank, CIT Group and M&T Group. CIT Group, which rounded out the top ten worst banks, had roughly half of the complaints that TCF National Bank did.