2023-08-27 15:07:20
Even the professionals sometimes lose track in these times. Ania Scholz is responsible for overnight and fixed-term deposit comparisons at FMH-Finanzberatung, but she hasn’t seen as much change as she is at the moment for a long time. “30 new customer campaigns by the banks with new interest rates within a few days are currently the rule rather than the exception,” says Scholz.
Dennis Kremer
Editor in the “Value” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.
And an end is initially not in sight. For example, Check-24-Bank C24 has announced an overnight interest rate of 4.0 percent for new and existing customers from September 1st, which it guarantees until December 31st of this year. A Check-24 current account is required. And the online broker Scalable Capital will also pay 4.0 percent interest on new deposits from September – but only under certain conditions. For example, customers must execute at least four securities trades from September through December through Scalable.
This shows that the market is on the move, which is basically not bad news for bank customers. At the same time, however, this also makes it clear that customers often have to take a close look, many offers are limited in time, like that of C24. After December 31, the interest rate is expected to decrease significantly. Or the offers are subject to certain conditions, such as the offer from Scalable Capital.
Even passionate interest rate hunters are wondering whether all of this is always worth the effort. Is it really worth chasing after every offer? Or can’t it also be rational to forego a few tenths of a percentage point in interest?
Behavioral economists call this “rational inertia”. In fact, when it comes to interest rates, at first glance there is little to suggest it. At second glance it looks different.
To remain at first glance: The effort involved in opening a call or time deposit account has decreased significantly in times of digitization. It is true that a customer still has to endure a complicated identification procedure that is difficult to avoid for security reasons. You used to have to go to the post office for this, but today you can also do it via video chat, which is also not always fun. It is not uncommon for longer waiting times and also absurd situations when the call center employees absolutely cannot read the necessary ID documents, even though they are clearly held in front of the camera. But at least going to the branch is no longer absolutely necessary, and providers such as Weltsparen even make it possible to conclude different overnight and fixed-term deposit offers from one account. The bottom line is that in most cases there is an investment of time that makes the search for the best interest rate seem quite reasonable.
The second look: the psychological costs
But then the second and more precise look follows. It can even make staunch interest rate hunters doubt. First of all, there are the psychological costs of looking for interest. Sounds strange, but it is quite relevant. This includes, for example, the concern of overlooking something when opening a new overnight or time deposit account. Two current offers show that this fear is not unjustified.
Example number one: the offer of the fintech Follow My Money. In cooperation with Baader Bank, the fintech currently offers the highest overnight money offer for new customers, namely 4.1 percent. That sounds tempting, but from December 1st the interest rate will drop to 1.5 percent. FMH expert Scholz has calculated what this means for customers who carry their money to Follow My Money under these conditions for a year. The two different interest rates result in an average annual return of 2.22 percent. That’s still not such a bad offer, but it’s a lot less than it first appears.
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