Rabobank

If the new coronavirus Covid-19 turns into a global pandemic, economists at Rabobank foresee an economic recession in large parts of the world, including the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Italy, and the United States. "This economic crisis could become even worse if it turned into a financial crisis, for example when the number of bankruptcies increase sharply worldwide," the Rabobank economists said, the Telegraaf reports.

Rabobank customers with more than 1 million euros in their savings accounts will soon have to pay to keep their money in the bank. The bank is implementing a savings interest rate of -0.5 percent on savings accounts with more than a million euros as of July 1st or private customers, and as of May 1st for business customers, RTL Nieuws reports.

Four banks teamed up with the Dutch government and authorities to fight against financial service providers who launder money for criminals, Financieele Dagblad reported on Friday based on information from an anonymous source.

According to FD, ABN Amro, ING, Rabobank and Volksbank signed a covenant with the National Police, the FIOD, the Public Prosecution Service, and financial intelligence unit FIU. This "serious crime task force" will focus on upper world lackeys who facilitate undermining crime. 

Dutch central bank DNB penalized Rabobank last year due to money laundering risk. The bank has not yet sufficiently screened 40 thousand of its customers. The bank confirmed this penalty payment, saying that it mentioned it in reports, NOS reports.

ABN Amro is lowering the interest on its freely withdrawable savings accounts from 0.02 percent to 0.01 percent as of November 1st, the bank said on its website on Friday. Savings interest at ING is still 0.02 percent and at Rabobank 0.03 percent, NU.nl reports

Five Dutch banks want to team up and establish an organization to tackle money laundering together. The idea is that by viewing the banks' total 10 billion transactions per year together, it will be easier for the organization - which they plan to call Transactie Monitoring Nederland (TMNL) - to identify suspicious activities, the Dutch association of banks NVB said to RTL Nieuws.

Dutch consumers will start paying interest on their savings accounts in the near future, various analysts told Financieele Dagblad. They describe negative interest rates on savings as an unavoidable future.

The cash that Dutch banks keep and are required to deposit at the European Central Bank currently costs them more than half a billion euros per year, due to the negative deposit interest rate. "Dutch banks together have 138 billion euros in surplus liquidity, and they pay 0.4 percent on that", Elwin de Groot of Rabobank said to FD.

Rabobank is no longer taking professional football clubs as clients due to "raised to unacceptable risks of money laundering, corruption, fraud and other abuses", NRC reports based on an internal message the bank circulated this summer. Rabobank employees are also no longer allowed "to take on new managerial or supervisory positions" at professional football organizations due to a "potential conflict of interest", the message said. 

Since 2010 Dutch banks and insurers provided around 7.9 billion euros in financing to large shale gas and plastic companies, according to research by the Fair Banking and Insurance Guide. ING was the largest Dutch financier for these companies, investing 3.5 billion euros into them, NU.nl reports.

Industrial companies with a higher quality of management perform better - they have higher productivity and more international activities than companies with lower quality management, according to a study done by the University of Groningen and Statistics Netherlands at the request of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate. 

Dutch central bank DNB fined Rabobank over 1 million euros for not having its customer files in order, and therefore doing inadequate checks on criminal money flows, Rabobank confirmed to the Volkskrant.