Monday 2 December 2019

Short term Fixed Deposits - you might get a better rate from RM.

SCB RM informed me that they could offer 9month S$ FD at 1.85%. That's 0.2% higher than the website rate. Actually its not surprising since the financial markets are shifting from day to day whereas the website rate may be several days, if not weeks old. Yet you don't want to be updating the website every day as that might confuse customers (and also the web team and the loans/investment team might be different people and there is also lag in doing these updates).

Previously, I was also offered an US$ FD by SCB RM that was not advertised on the website.

When you look at China Taiping, Singlife, and NTUC offering 3 year endowment plans below 2.5% (and miserable SSB rates), 1.85% for 9 months actually looks pretty good. I asked the RM whether SCB on maturity will  rollover the FD into some default (i.e. lousy) interest rate if customers forget to give an instruction to discontinue, the RM stated that the money will go back to the main account. (You can actually check this in internet banking - my current US$ FD states the current instruction on maturity - i.e. it will go back to my High Account). So a 9month FD with no catches, definitely worth putting some excess money over it (after hitting the 'cap' of $70k for the OCBC 360 account).

Interest rates (and perceptions on its direction) of course vary from day to day, so its not guaranteed that such an offer is available everyday. I also guess that the usual term and condition of "fresh funds" applies, but not an issue as my plan is to transfer excess cash from OCBC 360.

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