Frankfurt Sparkasse Nürnberg is threatening to close around 10,000 customers’ current accounts. A corresponding letter of termination was sent to the first affected customers. It is about customers who have not agreed to the current General Terms and Conditions (GTC), as reported by the media of the publishing house Nürnberger Presse (“Nürnberger Zeitung”, “Nürnberger Nachrichten”).
It is the first time that such letters of termination from a large savings bank have become known. Sparkasse Nürnberg has around 210,000 private customers. In terms of total assets, it is one of the 20 largest savings banks in Germany.
According to Sparkasse Nürnberg, the terminations will take effect at the end of December 2022 or at the end of January 2023. The financial institution described the step as an “ultima ratio”.
The Sparkasse pointed out that since August 2021 it had asked customers in various ways to agree to the current conditions. 95 percent would have agreed. “Since we cannot maintain the account connection in the long term without a contractual basis,” said the Sparkasse, they have now begun to inform the remaining customers about the termination of their account contract.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
The background to the procedure is a judgment by the Federal Court of Justice from April 2021. According to this, financial institutions must obtain the express consent of their customers for changes to the terms and conditions, for example price increases (Az. XI ZR 26/20). The Federal Association of Consumers had sued the Postbank, which had raised the fees several times in recent years.
Approval by bank transfer at the Postbank
Up until the verdict, banks and savings banks had usually increased the fees above the existing clauses. They assumed that customers would tacitly consent if they did not object to a change within two months. Since very similar general terms and conditions are used in the German banking industry, the BGH decision is considered to be decisive for the entire industry.
Most of the credit institutions that ask customers for approval made current accounts more expensive in the three years before the BGH judgment or currently want to raise prices. So far, many financial institutions have avoided layoffs.
The Sparda-Bank Baden-Württemberg, one of the largest cooperative banks, had already terminated accounts at the beginning of the year, but ultimately closed very few. At the end of February, it was also announced that Postbank, which belongs to Deutsche Bank, was the first large private customer bank to close current accounts for customers who did not agree to the bank’s current prices and conditions. A mid-five-digit number of customers were affected.
However, Postbank customers were able to receive the bank details and automatically accept the terms and conditions by continuing to use the account within a certain period of time. This happened with a single transfer, a card payment or by withdrawing money from an ATM.
On request, Deutsche Bank said that 97 percent of customers ultimately agreed, around 1,000 customers did not. Some of these could not be reached by post or died. In the case of Sparkasse Nürnberg, the affected customers can still agree to the terms and conditions.
More: How good is my credit rating? Schufa will soon make this transparent for everyone