Rabobank is the first major bank to raise the interest rate on savings and investment accounts to 1 percent as of 1 June.
This announcement comes exactly one month after the previous increase announcement on April 17, when the old ‘boerenleenbank’ already raised interest rates by 0.25 percent to 0.75 percent.
As of June, this will be another quarter of a percent. This bank is thus at the forefront of savings interest compared to the other major banks in the Netherlands. At the end of 2022, Rabobank already set the savings interest rate at 0.25 percent, in February to 0.50 percent. Other major banks followed suit in February, such as ABN Amro, ING and SNS.
Foreign banks
Only foreign banks and investment platforms offer savers a higher fee, as does the online bank Bunq. There, the saver receives more than 2 percent interest on freely withdrawable savings.
Foreign and online financial institutions are trying to tempt Dutch savers with higher interest rates, said expert Amanda Bulthuis of Geld.nl earlier in The Telegraph. “The Dutch have a lot of savings, so foreign banks are happy to collect it.”
The foreign banks and Bunq follow the European Central Bank (ECB), which raised the main interest rate to 2.50 percent in February.
Money and environment
Rabobank was in the news yesterday thanks to actress Carice van Houten, who attended the annual meeting of this bank as a climate activist. She has joined climate activists such as Milieudefensie to ask questions about the climate policies of the country’s leading companies. They consider the objectives of the companies insufficient to combat global warming.