ING offered 7% for 3 months without notifying customers

ING offered 7% for 3 months without notifying customers

You just had to enter online banking, type in a transfer to another entity and stop just before confirming it. That is when a banner popped up out of nowhere, offering a deposit at 7% APR for three months. No email, no SMS, no call. Only those performing that action could see it, and only for a few weeks: the offer expired on January 9. The rest of the customers found out when there was nothing left to subscribe to.

The mechanism turned into a game of trial and error. Transferring 10,000 euros to iBanesto triggered the 7% offer; sending 24,000 euros to your own account left the interest at 6%. It also worked by targeting La Caixa with 15,000 euros, and in some cases, simulating a send from an associated account was enough. Strikingly, the actual balance did not matter: with an empty account, or just enough to cover monthly bills, the pop-up appeared regardless. The tease worked, turning the bank into a sort of flea market where the interest rate depended on the script you wrote in the form.

Why ING raised interest rates when market rates fell

The move came at the worst possible time for any bank: with the Euribor declining and the market pricing in rate cuts. Raising a rate in this context allows only one interpretation. Some saw it as a desperate measure to attract liquidity, while others drew on the context: according to one participant, the Dutch state had just intervened the parent company with two public administrators, an operation that required returning 10,000 euros at 8.5% interest. The shareholder punished the operation on the stock exchange. Meanwhile, the bank had to fill its coffers.

The fine print almost no one read

Rushing into a contract has a problem: you read less. And there were two details worth pausing for. The first was the interest on overdrafts, set at 7.95%, just a few tenths above what was already being charged. The second was the periodic modifications of terms and fees that the entity applied to its customers month after month. Together, they paint a bank that stops being the bargain of years past without making noise, slipping in small changes that no one disputes because each one, separately, seems irrelevant.

The order of the figures, if viewed as a whole, has its irony: it is more expensive to delay a credit card payment than to leave the account in the red.

The deposit race that closed in January

ING's 7% was not an isolated case, but the tip of a holiday campaign to attract funds, independent of the official drop in the price of money. Similar offers were piled into the same bucket, with similar rates but different terms and conditions:

• Activobank: 7% APR for 1 year
• Caixa Peine: 7% APR for 9 months
• Cajastur: 7% APR for 1 year
• Citibank: 7% APR for 6 months
• Ibercaja: 5.80% APR for 9 months

Almost all shared a trick: to get that rate, you had to subscribe to or transfer a pension plan for the same amount, a practice very common in December to balance the tax bill. Without the link, the catalog narrowed. While some withdrew products—Openbank was among the first to lower deposits—others pushed 5.1% for one year for increasing balances.

January 9: the window closes

The final stages were pure domestic arithmetic. A transfer order sent two weeks early landed with a value date after the offer closed, forcing a choice between subscribing hastily or waiting. The practical answer: you can establish the deposit the day before, and the bank will not activate the order until the money enters, without charging debtor interest for the mismatch. A margin that, according to participants, other entities do not provide.

On January 9, 2009, the link disappeared from the website. The 5.25% link remained, and with the tease, the offer dropped to 6%. Those who arrived late consoled themselves by looking at the 10,000 euros at 8.5% that, according to a user's account, had set everything in motion.