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IIn the defense against new deposits, a bank is now also intervening, which has won clients over the years with extremely high interest rates on demand and time deposits. Since Tuesday, Germany’s largest direct bank ING has been demanding a negative interest rate of 0.5 percent on all newly opened accounts in which more than 100,000 euros are placed. This applies to checking accounts and basic accounts, as well as overnight money called an additional account. The FAZ had already reported on such plans in August.
The background to this is that the European Central Bank has been demanding penalty interest rates on banks that accumulate excess deposits from customers for several years. “We were able to resist this development for a long time and have offset the costs of high inflows relative to the negative deposit rate from the ECB with our existing investment portfolio,” the bank said.
Announce values
The so-called custody fee will expire as of February 1, 2021, and will be removed from the account for the first time in March 2021, the bank explained in a message. A spokesperson for the institute emphasized to the FAZ that in the first half of 2020, significantly less than 1 percent of newly opened accounts were above the 100,000 euro limit.
Like other institutions, ING tries to get its clients to invest in securities rather than simply leaving the money in their accounts. To this end, the bank cooperates with the Munich-based robo-advisor Scalable Capital, which promises automated investment advice and invests clients’ money primarily in passive index funds (ETFs). In the case of savings plans, the bank now enables savings fees from one euro.
