A provocative question, perhaps, and not one that I will be able to answer definitively. But I think it is a question that rarely even gets asked.
For most of my banking life, my choice of bank has been a matter of convenience and cost. If a bank has lots of branches, doesn't charge much for its services, and gives a decent interest rate, that was enough for me.
But I've been increasingly uncomfortable with this. After all, the bank looks after my money, and I am responsible for how my money is used. I wouldn't want my money to be used to make me rich through investing in the manufacturing of weapons for corrupt regimes, through destroying the planet, or through gambling on the food markets and making poor people starve. But I would have had no problem with my bank doing exactly that.
So we're in the process of transferring from Barclays to The Co-operative Bank, largely because of the Co-op's ethical investment policy (and, admittedly, because banking with the Co-op is just as convenient as banking with Barclays). See "The Co-operative Bank Ethical Policy" a few pages into this, or the video below.
I was going to say more in this post, but fortunately Jeremy at Making Wealth History has done the job for me, in a post about Bank Transfer Day (UK version), which is encouraging people to change their bank on 5 November. Will you be one of them?