Advertising & affiliate disclosures
How Bank Offers makes money, the structure of our affiliate relationships, and the firewall between editorial and advertising.
Affiliate disclosure (FTC-compliant)
Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you click an affiliate link and open an account or transact with the linked institution, we may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. As of 2026-10-03, no page on this site contains an affiliate link, and no offers are currently listed. If that changes, this page and the affected pages will say so.
Any affiliate link on this site will carry a visible "affiliate link" label next to it and be marked with rel="sponsored nofollow" in the HTML, consistent with FTC guidance that disclosures be clear and conspicuous. The disclosure strip at the top of every page provides standing notice of the affiliate-link economics. This page provides the full policy.
Categories of affiliate relationships
We work with affiliate networks and direct partner programs across the following categories:
- Consumer banks offering checking, savings, MMA, and CD products.
- Online and challenger banks.
- Brokerage firms offering transfer bonuses.
- Credit unions where membership and account opening are available to readers through trackable affiliate links.
- Affiliate networks that aggregate offers across multiple institutions.
We don't list specific partner institutions here because the partner roster changes. Any specific institution that pays us a commission for a reader-initiated account opening has an affiliate link marked accordingly on the page where it appears. Institutions we cover that don't have an affiliate program are linked with standard non-sponsored links.
Editorial firewall
Editorial coverage and the affiliate program are independent. Specifically:
- Whether an institution participates in an affiliate program is not a factor in whether we cover the institution's offers.
- Our evaluation methodology (see methodology) is the same whether the offer is affiliate-linkable or not.
- Commission rates do not influence the order or prominence of offers in our coverage.
- An institution that pays us a commission cannot purchase positive coverage, custom rankings, or removal of unfavorable terms-section content.
- An institution that does not pay us a commission is eligible for the same coverage as one that does.
Editorial decisions, including which offers to feature and how to characterize them, are made by the editorial team independently of the advertising relationship.
Plain-language summary
When we say "we may earn a commission" — what does that actually mean?
- If you click a regular (non-sponsored) link to a bank's site, no commission flows to us regardless of what you do next.
- If you click a sponsored link to a bank's site and don't open an account, no commission flows to us.
- If you click a sponsored link and open an account that the bank's affiliate program credits to our referrer ID, the bank pays us a commission based on the program's terms (often a fixed amount per qualified account opening). The commission comes from the bank's marketing budget, not from any fee charged to you.
The reader pays nothing additional for clicking through an affiliate link. The bank uses affiliate commissions as one channel of marketing spend; our payment is the bank's customer acquisition cost for the readers we send.
How to identify disclosed vs non-disclosed links
Sponsored links are labeled "affiliate link" in visible text next to the link and tagged with rel="sponsored nofollow" in the HTML. A link without that label is not an affiliate link.
Non-disclosed links to bank or institution pages — for example, links to an FDIC.gov educational resource, an NCUA member-lookup tool, an IRS form, or a bank's official terms page that we're citing for verification rather than referring readers to — are standard href links without the sponsored attribute. These are editorial references, not revenue-generating links.
Reader privacy
When you click through an affiliate link, the affiliate network or partner program receives information about the referral (typically: the source publisher, the click time, sometimes a referral cookie that persists for a short window). What information the destination institution collects when you arrive on their site is governed by their privacy policy, not ours.
This site does not require an account, does not collect logins, and does not host comments. It does not currently display advertising.
Analytics. Every page loads Google Analytics 4 (Google's gtag.js). Google Analytics sets first-party cookies and collects information such as the pages you view, referring site, approximate location derived from your IP address, device and browser type, and on-page interactions. We use it to understand which pages are read; we don't use it to identify individual readers. Google processes this data under its own privacy policy. You can block it with your browser's cookie or tracking-protection settings, a content blocker, or Google's Analytics opt-out browser add-on.
Hosting. Our hosting provider may keep standard server logs (such as IP address, user agent and requested URL) for security and operations. Search engines' webmaster tools give us aggregate search data (queries and clicks), not information about individual visitors.
We don't sell, share, or rent reader contact information. The contact addresses listed on the contact page route to our editorial inbox; correspondence there is treated as confidential and not used for marketing.
Contacting us about advertising
Inquiries about advertising opportunities, affiliate partnerships, or sponsored placements should go to the advertising address listed on the contact page — not the editorial inbox. This separation is intentional: editorial and advertising are kept operationally distinct.
Sponsored content, where it ever exists, is clearly labeled as such on the affected page. We have not run sponsored-content pieces to date; if we do in the future, the labeling standard is "Sponsored" at the top of the affected page in a visible, non-removable position.
Regulatory framework
The disclosure practices on this site are designed to comply with the FTC's Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255), which require clear and conspicuous disclosure of material connections between endorsers and advertisers, and with the FTC's disclosure guidance generally. We aim to err on the side of more disclosure rather than less.
If you believe a specific page does not meet our disclosure standards or the FTC's expectations, please contact the editorial inbox so we can review and correct.