What's in a name?

What's in a name?

Who is Julian Hodge and would you entrust your life's savings to his bank? Or how do you feel about handing over fistfuls of spare dollars to FirstSave, Nigeria's finest? Maybe, as a soft compromise, you might settle for wiring your wonga to an account with Anglo Irish where every penny, not just £50,000, is guaranteed by the Irish government.

Anyone hunting the very best in easy-access or fixed savings rates must today ask themselves these questions and endure hours of internet research and fact-finding to secure peace of mind for their money.

As the Tories and Labour draw the battle lines over who will do the most to help savers battered by crashing interest rates, in the best-buy tables UK banks and building socities have, perhaps only temporarily, ceded dominance to overseas providers. Top of Moneyfacts's tables for easy access accounts is Anglo Irish offering 4.55%, while top of the best-buy fixed rates is ICICI, the giant Indian savings bank, touting 5.1%; other featured institutions include Julian Hodge Bank and FirstSave.

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Making sure you do extra homework with overseas banks is neither xenophobia nor bias against small financial institutions who usually bury their financial lights deep beneath a bushel: it is simply a case of being able to rest easy as you save.

At one remove, this is a positive development: it can only do us good to properly investigate those financial bodies to whom we're happy to give our cash and if we learn plenty along the way - the strength of a country's banking system, how it's rated by credit agencies, rates of interest across a whole spectrum of accounts, whether it's as comprehensively regulated as UK banks - then more's the better. But it's another layer of complexity for savers who are already struggling at the moment. Do you think it's worth it? Or have you just opted to hold your cash with a household name - no matter how poor the rate on offer?

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2009