Rabobank to hit more customers with negative interest

Rabobank customers with more than 250 thousand euros in their current, savings and investor accounts will be charged an interest rate of -0.5 percent from 1 January 2021. This applies to both private and business customers, and the negative interest will apply to all credit above 250,000 euros, the bank announced on Wednesday, NU.nl reports.

The negative interest is calculated per account. So if a customer has more than 250 thousand euros at the bank, but spread over different accounts and no single account has more than 250 thousand euros in it, they will not be affected by the negative interest.

Customers who have less than 250 thousand euros in their Rabobank savings and investor accounts will receive 0.01 percent interest on the money.

According to the bank, very few customers will be affected by this new measures. 98.7 percent of all private and business customers are currently below the limit for negative interest, Rabobank said.

The bank cannot, however, guarantee that the threshold for negative interest won't be lowered in the future. When Rabobank first applied negative interest in February of this year, it applied only to customers with more than 1 million euros in their savings account.