Research questioning 1,466 current account holders found that around 3 million current account owners claimed to have changed bank in the last five years or are likely to do so in the next 12 months.

According to Brett Afshar, Financial Consultant "Customer switching has become a major issue of concern to banks and building societies in recent years. There are signs that inertia is beginning to disappear from the markets."

Several factors are prompting consumers to walk out on the long standing relationships that they have with their financial provider, and Mintel believes that this trend is likely to intensify in the future. Increasing competition based upon cost and added-value, product and service innovation and ease of account switching have all weakened the traditional bank customer relationship, and there are worrying signals to suggest that many consumers are on the verge of breaking links with their bank. Simultaneously, consumers are becoming more likely to defect to another provider if they don't receive "top notch" service.

Mintel's research finds that defection is increasingly less of an idle threat since switching account provider is so much easier in today's technology driven marketplace. A significant 16% of consumers would switch to another bank offering favourable rates on loans and savings. This figure rises to almost a quarter of 16-24 year olds. A further 14% of adults would switch banks if the process was guaranteed to be hassle-free - equating to almost 5.6 million people.