COINC pays 25 euros to open an account: the fine print of the gift

COINC pays 25 euros to open an account and keep 10 euros

Opening an account at COINC and leaving ten euros inside pays off. The online bank, owned by Bankinter, pays 25 euros to attract new customers, and the promotion has been repeating for months. The mechanic is always the same: enter a promotional code in the registration form, complete the signup, create a goal—a requirement that more than one discovers late—and maintain a minimum balance of 10 euros until a deadline that changes with each campaign.

The first code circulating in forums, 14COINC105463, required keeping the ten euros until January 20. Later came 14COINC16635, 14COINC118217, 14COINC145253 and a long etcetera. The account also offers the 0.70% and charges no fees, so whoever opens it just for the gift can cancel it afterwards without cost. Or stay. That's the business.

What to do to collect the 25 euros from COINC

The process has three steps and a detail that repeats in all versions of the promotion: creating the goal is essential. It is not enough to open the account and put in the money. You must complete the registration with all data, attach the personal documentation requested by the bank, wait for verification and keep the minimum balance until the date indicated in each call.

Deadlines have varied. The promotion valid between November 29, 2016 and January 9, 2017 asked to keep the 10 euros until January 20. The next one, with registration before April 23, extended the retention until May 7. Then came the Amazon check: registration until June 30, minimum balance until July 15, and the payment—the 25 euros—before July 30. In September the prize increased: 40 net euros with code PREMIUM, registration before September 15 and balance held until December 31.

The recurring question in each new wave is the same: is there any cost? Is it easy to cancel? The repeated answer is that there are no fees and that cancellation poses no problems once the incentive is collected.

The real business: Member Get Member at balance price

Here appears the most interesting analysis of the whole discussion. Why does a bank give away money to attract customers who might leave in three months? The prevailing answer is that COINC does not appear on radio, television, or press. There is no conventional advertising campaign. It is the customers themselves who run the campaign, code by code, message by message.

The circulating calculation is revealing: if the bank bonuses a thousand registrations—and hardly even covers that, the maximum cost per campaign is around 50,000 euros. Any spot on television or radio exceeds that figure with ease. MGM, Member Get Member, they call it in the sector. Advertising at balance price with the customer as an involuntary commercial.

Some go further and suspect that the real product is the data: the spending and saving habits of the new customer. Those who raise it recognize, however, that they do not receive monthly calls offering pre-approved credits, something that does happen with other more traditional entities. The fine print on what COINC does with personal information does not appear in any of the promotions.

Codes that expire and copies that enrage

The word-of-mouth mechanic has a limit: each code admits a finite number of uses, usually five. Hence the insistence on warning by private message when someone uses it, to withdraw it before it runs out. And hence the friction. When a newcomer copies literally the presentation text of another to publish their own code, the response does not wait: plagiarism of a presentation message is, in these circuits, an unforgivable disrespect.

The result is a curious ecosystem: dozens of codes competing for a limited number of interested parties. As one participant summarizes with sarcasm, there are more codes than possible customers. Supply exceeds demand and the incentive becomes social currency.

The promotion that does not die

The striking thing is the persistence. The campaign starts with 25 euros in cash, mutates to a 25 euro Amazon check, rises to 40 net euros in September and remains alive. Each call has its dates, its code and its fine print, but the skeleton is identical. Ten euros held, a goal created, a code entered.

For the customer, the calculation is simple: immobilize ten euros for a few weeks in exchange for 25 or 40. Stratified profitability on the committed capital, although the capital is ridiculous. For the bank, the bet is to capture a percentage of those customers who stay beyond the gift. And for the code ecosystem, a parallel economy of favors, warnings and reproaches.

It remains to be seen if the strategy holds when the incentive ceases to be news. The next call will say whether word-of-mouth continues to work or if the code market saturates definitively. For now, the bank has not needed to buy a single ad.

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Key data of the COINC promotion

• Initial incentive: 25 net euros deposited in account
• September 2017 incentive: 40 net euros in cash
• Required minimum balance: 10 euros
• Account remuneration: 0.70% without fees
• Uses per code: 5 invitations
• Estimated cost of a thousand registrations for the bank: 50,000 euros