Frankfurt The German direct banks are again campaigning aggressively for deposits from customers and are raising overnight interest rates. The DKB raises the interest rate in April from the current 0.4 percent to one percent per year. The new interest rate applies to new and existing call money accounts, the DKB explained to the Handelsblatt.
Commerzbank and its online subsidiary Comdirect increased their deposit rates on call money on Wednesday. At Commerzbank, the interest rate increases from 0.25 to 0.4 percent, at Comdirect from 0.3 to 0.5 percent. Unlimited investments are also possible here.
Commerzbank and Comdirect together have almost eleven million private customers. ING, in turn, has already announced that it will pay its existing customers 0.6 percent on overnight money from next Wednesday. So far it’s 0.3 percent. She sees “good chances” of continuing the rate hikes.
The DKB has a total of over five million customers. A current account is a requirement for a money market account. ING has nine million customers. The interest rate hikes are a sign that financial institutions with online-savvy customers need to make their offers at least a little more attractive.
ING temporarily pays new customers even two percent interest. Neobrokers Scalable and Trade Republic made headlines, attracting 2.3 percent and two percent respectively.
49 percent of the banks surveyed do not pay overnight interest
That doesn’t sound like much compared to the ECB’s deposit rate of 2.5 percent and inflation, which is still 8.7 percent. But the offers are higher than what German financial institutions pay on average. According to the comparison portal Verivox, 49 percent of the financial institutions still do not offer overnight interest rates – specifically, 321 out of 656 banks.
In the case of savings banks and Volksbanks, the share is still over 50 percent each, and on average they only charge slightly more than 0.1 percent interest on overnight money. Verivox examines the banks whose call money conditions are freely accessible.
Commerzbank has not yet registered any large outflows of customer funds to financial start-ups such as Trade Republic or Scalable. With its own interest rate policy, Commerzbank pays particular attention to how other established financial institutions operate.
So far, these have been more cautious than neo-brokers, said CFO Bettina Orlopp. “However, we expect higher interest rates for customer deposits here over the course of the year,” she emphasized.
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