Dutch households are putting more and more money in bank accounts abroad, according to the latest quarterly figures from DNB and the ECB. Countries where savings rates have recently risen are particularly popular among Dutch savers.
© ANP
By the end of September 2023, Dutch households had €10.5 billion in bank balances in euro area countries excluding the Netherlands, almost twice the amount recorded two years earlier (€5.6 billion). In total, some 1.8% of the combined bank deposits of Dutch households is now held in foreign banks.
By comparison, over the same period, Dutch households' bank deposits with Dutch banks went up by about €41.3 billion (7.9%), to €566.7 billion at the end of September 2023. Bank deposits include money in both savings and payment accounts.
Whereas our neighbouring Germany and Belgium are traditionally popular countries for holding a bank account abroad, recently, countries offering higher savings rates have gained popularity.
In absolute amounts, the highest proportion of Dutch savings abroad are outstanding in Germany (€2.3 billion), followed by Spain and Estonia (both €1.5 billion). In relative terms, bank savings in the Baltic states, Italy and Greece increased recently.
Conversely, foreign euro area households, especially from Germany and Belgium, hold €10.3 billion in bank deposits in the Netherlands. This category includes emigrated Dutch nationals living abroad for more than a year.
Within the European Union, it has been agreed that the deposit guarantee offers equivalent protection in all countries. Within the euro area, savings are always protected up to €100,000 per bank per person.
By the end of the third quarter of 2023, the combined bank deposits of Dutch households at home and abroad amounted to €577.2 billion. This puts the Netherlands in seventh place in the euro area in terms of average bank deposit size per resident.
Of the total bank deposits of Dutch households, some €460 billion are in savings accounts, with the remainder in payment accounts. In recent years more and more Dutch households have allowed the balance in their payment account to accumulate as the interest rate differential between payment accounts and instant-access savings accounts was virtually nil.
Over the past year, however, households have moved some €15 billion from payment accounts to savings accounts as savings rates have gone up, widening the differential between payment accounts and instant-access savings accounts. This differential currently stands at just over one percentage point.
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