Banks shed customers as 1m take their business elsewhere

More than a million current accounts were switched last year

The payments body Bacs, which oversees the new current account seven-day switching service, said 1,010,423 switches were made between January 1 and December 31 2016.

During the previous 12 months, there had been 23,516 more switches, with 1,033,939 recorded.

The Halifax, Santander and the Nationwide Building Society were among the beneficiaries of the migrations.

Barclays was the biggest loser, shedding 26,700 accounts. HSBC, which includes the First Direct and Marks & Spencer Bank brands, lost 12,600 customers.

The Yorkshire and Clydesdale Banks, part of the same company, lost 6,080 accounts.

Bacs said that in November 2016, awareness of the switching service reached a record high, with more than three-quarters (78%) of people saying they have heard of it, up 20 percentage points since the service launched in 2013.

More than 3.5 million switches have taken place since the service, which aims to take the hassle out of moving current accounts, was launched.

The switching service has reduced the length of time it takes to switch from up to 30 working days to just seven. Outgoing and incoming payments are automatically moved to the new account and the old account is closed.

Banks and building societies also released figures showing the number of account switches using the service between April 1 and June 30 2016.

They show Santander, Nationwide Building Society and Halifax continued to make particularly strong gains, with newer challengers Tesco Bank and TSB also seeing net increases.

The figures came on the day HSBC announced it was closing 62 more branches - nine of them in Yorkshire - with 180 staff at risk. Last week, Yorkshire Bank said it was closing 39 branches, including 18 in Yorkshire.