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Best bank to get interest on savings account ?

Discuss the different banking options, rates, offers and perks.
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x9200
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Post by x9200 » Fri, 04 Apr 2014 10:05 am

Brah, I used to have some CCs with HSBC. My experience with them handling practically any requests (e.g. changing the residential address) was the worst ever for any bank I had an account with. Nothing was smooth, all required multiple calls/personal visits to the outlets and often, after all this, still did not work.

For DBS I don't like two things: 1) some money transfer operations can take up to 3 days to appear on the list while exactly the same for ocbc is instant; 2) It's a bit complicated and I don't want to get into details, but basically I requested some adjustments to the max spending limits distribution and they refused it. I still got what I wanted by terminating some of the services and and readjusting what was left. What I terminated with dbs I opened with another bank. They lost extra profit because of this. Such short-sightedness in a pretty obvious case is like saying to the customer, you are an idiot.

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Post by Beeroclock » Fri, 04 Apr 2014 10:40 am

Noted x9200... I also had an ocbc credit card a while back and was not really impressed with the service and internet banking either.... but I'm a sucker for a "good deal" and this interest rate is quite a margin beyond what else you can get here, so I will give it a shot nonetheless... Just did the online apply which took about 4-5 mins and has been smooth so far, but let's see how much hair pulling will ensue in order to get this account opened and running !

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zzm9980
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Post by zzm9980 » Fri, 04 Apr 2014 12:35 pm

x9200 wrote:
What I would like to have:
- reliable Internet banking (IB)
- cards and such fully integrated into IB
- TT available from within IB
- reliable and responsive customer service
- cards working overseas and in on-line purchases
Citi has all of those, and they work pretty well. Only complaint is changing a few things such as mobile number must be done by paper, can't do it online unlike DBS.
x9200 wrote: I don't care too much about:
- ATMs (I hardly use cash for any payment)

Things like rewards etc. in neutral but nice to have.
Citi has the best rewards IMO. They seem to have rebates at a lot of useful places (unlike other banks where the rebates may only be good at places like Tangs which has 2 stores on the whole island) and one of the best miles cards.

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Post by x9200 » Fri, 04 Apr 2014 3:32 pm

Thanks zzm. How is City regarding the annual fees? Do they tend to wave it if the card is used regularly or rather not? I.e. for the dividend card.

Beeroclock, sorry, I didn't try to discourage you, just your post triggered me to take some action.

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rajagainstthemachine
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Post by rajagainstthemachine » Fri, 04 Apr 2014 3:37 pm

x9200 wrote:Thanks zzm. How is City regarding the annual fees? Do they tend to wave it if the card is used regularly or rather not? I.e. for the dividend card.

Beeroclock, sorry, I didn't try to discourage you, just your post triggered me to take some action.
I use citi and I've used their credit cards too, when i opened an account with them they gave me 2 free credit cards, one with VISA and the other with Mastercard. I only one out of the two. they did slap an annual fee on both cards, i just rang them up and asked them and they happily obliged to waive way the annual fee for both cards even though i never really use the other one at all.
The other thing is that if you have a citibank account overseas you can link them in your citi sg profile and you can view details from a single interface.
the only con i have so far is that the OTP ( one time pin ) for online transactions are sent out over phone and they have no security dongle to generate pins for online transactions
To get there early is on time and showing up on time is late

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Post by Beeroclock » Fri, 04 Apr 2014 4:01 pm

x9200 wrote:Thanks zzm. How is City regarding the annual fees? Do they tend to wave it if the card is used regularly or rather not? I.e. for the dividend card.

Beeroclock, sorry, I didn't try to discourage you, just your post triggered me to take some action.
That's fine it was a welcome reminder for me to set an appropriately low expectation and surely better deal with the likely frustration ahead

I have the citi clear visa and they have been waiving the annual fee relatively painlessly, just need to remember to call them when it comes on your statement. It's automated provided you use it enough (in my case $200-300/mth seems okay) will get back an sms saying fee waiver approved.

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Post by zzm9980 » Fri, 04 Apr 2014 10:57 pm

x9200 wrote:Thanks zzm. How is City regarding the annual fees? Do they tend to wave it if the card is used regularly or rather not? I.e. for the dividend card.

Beeroclock, sorry, I didn't try to discourage you, just your post triggered me to take some action.
Yes they've always waved fees for me. I only used the Premier Miles card though. Not sure if they have a higher tier card that they won't waive fees on.

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Post by zzm9980 » Fri, 04 Apr 2014 11:02 pm

rajagainstthemachine wrote:
x9200 wrote:Thanks zzm. How is City regarding the annual fees? Do they tend to wave it if the card is used regularly or rather not? I.e. for the dividend card.

Beeroclock, sorry, I didn't try to discourage you, just your post triggered me to take some action.
I use citi and I've used their credit cards too, when i opened an account with them they gave me 2 free credit cards, one with VISA and the other with Mastercard. I only one out of the two. they did slap an annual fee on both cards, i just rang them up and asked them and they happily obliged to waive way the annual fee for both cards even though i never really use the other one at all.
The other thing is that if you have a citibank account overseas you can link them in your citi sg profile and you can view details from a single interface.
the only con i have so far is that the OTP ( one time pin ) for online transactions are sent out over phone and they have no security dongle to generate pins for online transactions
They've had them ever since all of the banks updated to the interactive 2fa tokens with signing.

Image

x9200
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Post by x9200 » Sat, 05 Apr 2014 8:46 am

Thank you for your responses. It looks like City will be the one.

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rajagainstthemachine
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Post by rajagainstthemachine » Sat, 05 Apr 2014 10:20 am

zzm9980 wrote:
rajagainstthemachine wrote:
x9200 wrote:Thanks zzm. How is City regarding the annual fees? Do they tend to wave it if the card is used regularly or rather not? I.e. for the dividend card.

Beeroclock, sorry, I didn't try to discourage you, just your post triggered me to take some action.
I use citi and I've used their credit cards too, when i opened an account with them they gave me 2 free credit cards, one with VISA and the other with Mastercard. I only one out of the two. they did slap an annual fee on both cards, i just rang them up and asked them and they happily obliged to waive way the annual fee for both cards even though i never really use the other one at all.
The other thing is that if you have a citibank account overseas you can link them in your citi sg profile and you can view details from a single interface.
the only con i have so far is that the OTP ( one time pin ) for online transactions are sent out over phone and they have no security dongle to generate pins for online transactions
They've had them ever since all of the banks updated to the interactive 2fa tokens with signing.

Image

oh wow! i didn't know that and i don't have one at the moment, i'll go and get one i think

and btw the other useful thing is you can withdraw money from the following other ATM's too
standard chartered, maybank, state bank of india, hsbc , ANZ and there is no transaction fee, and there are usually 1-2 people queued up in these ATMs as opposed to 30 at DBS or UOB
To get there early is on time and showing up on time is late

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Post by Beeroclock » Mon, 16 Jun 2014 10:23 pm

Beeroclock wrote:Noted x9200... I also had an ocbc credit card a while back and was not really impressed with the service and internet banking either.... but I'm a sucker for a "good deal" and this interest rate is quite a margin beyond what else you can get here, so I will give it a shot nonetheless... Just did the online apply which took about 4-5 mins and has been smooth so far, but let's see how much hair pulling will ensue in order to get this account opened and running !
Just a feedback, I am using this OCBC 360 account and collecting the 3% already for the last month. For those keen to get a decent return on your working capital, this must be the best option.for up to 50k, and with the FAST system you can easily move money between your accounts online if you need to shift it back and forth. Setup was not too bad although I did have one phone call where the OCBC customer care lady hung up (by mistake presumably) and didn't bother calling back... Annoying but Tolerable

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Post by Wd40 » Sat, 08 Nov 2014 9:47 am

sunbox wrote:Thank you Beeroclock. INR is getting strong from past few weeks but with fed cutting stimulus, my guess it will get weak when FII's start pulling back their money. Its safe to keep money in SG till that time and YES, CPF is the only safest bet which makes sense if you want to earn interest.
So Sunbox, still keeping money in SG? :) Just did some back of the envelope calculations, even if you had converted to INR at the beginning of the worst period of INR depreciation, you would still be better off being in INR if you take the interest rate into account.

Lets take the last 5 years SGD to INR was 33.67 on 8th Nov 2009 and now it is 47.5. So if you kept your dollars without transferring you would have made 41% gains. But if you transferred and put it into a fixed deposit of 9% annual interest, quarterly compounding, in 5 years it would increase by 56%!

Now the next 5 years, my bet is INR is most likely going to outperform the SGD, but given the above even if it underperforms slightly, you are still better off converting to INR :)

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Re: Best bank to get interest on savings account ?

Post by DavidChoy » Mon, 16 Feb 2015 1:06 am

I came across this: http://www.moneydigest.sg/best-bank-accounts-singapore/

It seems like the OCBC 360 is the best account out there.

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Re: Best bank to get interest on savings account ?

Post by navruzbek » Fri, 21 Apr 2017 8:41 pm

Hi guys, I have just caught a gap here. The interest rate is 5% in my country, so i can pay you 4 % (earning 1% for myself) in dollar for the 12 month period. what u think?

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Re: Best bank to get interest on savings account ?

Post by Strong Eagle » Fri, 21 Apr 2017 10:02 pm

navruzbek wrote:Hi guys, I have just caught a gap here. The interest rate is 5% in my country, so i can pay you 4 % (earning 1% for myself) in dollar for the 12 month period. what u think?
Yes, well, putting my money into Uzbekistan with someone I don't know doesn't sound like a very good strategy at all.

It's five percent because it is high risk.

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