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Scoreboard at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange
Photo: Sebastian Gollnow / dpa
It is strange at first glance: while banks are making checking accounts more and more expensive, accounts for securities are becoming cheaper and cheaper.
Why are the banks constantly coming up with new, more or less hidden fees for current accounts with great imagination - and not for custody accounts?
The simple answer: competition makes you move.
Unlike the market for current accounts, depots were hardly contested for a long time.
And so the banks and savings banks were able to charge high fees for the depot.
But direct banks and now also new online brokers have been putting pressure on the old banking world for some time.
Cases like that of my ex-colleague Thomas, who paid hundreds of euros in fees for his custody account to Deutsche Bank every year, no longer have to be the case.
Even Deutsche Bank has long offered a free custody account for customers who ask for it: MaxBlue.
Anyone who joins the new providers right away hardly has to pay anything to trade the shares.
And the big, free brokers keep undercutting each other in courting customers.
You can save 10,000 euros over 20 years.
Why stocks?
The strategy with the predatory prices can even be economically sensible from the point of view of the banks.
People who have a bit more money in their pockets are more likely to trade securities, so they can also be good customers in other respects.
There are now twelve million share and share fund owners in Germany.
If you look at the number of custody accounts, it shows that some investors even have more than one custody account.
And more and more often, investors are also pursuing systematic old-age provision with these portfolios.
Market-wide international index funds (ETFs) are becoming the favorite investment for many investors in the early 21st century.
To ensure that such old-age provision not only takes advantage of the opportunities, but also limits the risks, savers should give themselves 15 years or more.
And they should actually invest worldwide and across the market with an index fund.
ETFs that track the MSCI World invest in up to 1600 companies from 23 countries, from Amazon to Zalando.
Index funds that track the comparable British FTSE All World Index even reflect its more than 4000 companies and add emerging markets like Brazil.
Both were safe bets in the past - for investors with perseverance.
After fifteen years there were no losses and an average return of seven to nine percent per year.
How's the depot?
My colleagues at Finanztip have just looked at 20 current offers for private custody accounts in Germany and made recommendations for bank accounts and broker accounts.
If you want to open a depot today, there are basically two options, but in three variants.
First option: In addition to your checking account, you create a securities account with your bank or one of your banks, i.e. an account only for securities.
In the best case, this costs a few euros a year or nothing at all.
If you're unlucky and don't compare, you might end up paying as much as my ex-colleague Thomas.
In addition to the basic fee, there may also be a pro rata fee based on the values that you park in the depot.
Or each individual position costs another time fee just for lying around.
And the third component is the potential cost of buying and selling securities.
Either because you buy securities for a certain sum or because you have set up a savings plan and pay in with it every month, quarter or year.
It all used to cost a lot of money in the past, and some of these fee-busters still exist today.
A depot at Deutsche Bank cost 20 euros per year in 2007, and 0.14 percent of the deposit, i.e. 70 euros for 50,000 euros in the depot.
Added to this were the purchase costs, which quickly accounted for one percent of the purchase volume on the stock exchange.
Direct banks such as ING, DKB, Consors or Comdirect declared war on this model a few years ago.
With them, the depot itself is free or at least has a free option if you set up a savings plan, for example.
And there was no longer a pro rata investor fee.
You can also have your salary account and your custody account at a direct bank and combine both with very low costs overall.
Checking account customers only need a few clicks to set it up – the bank already knows you.
Online and neo-brokers are competing
Second variant: You go to a new provider, namely one of the so-called online brokers or neobrokers.
These are trading platforms that make it possible to buy and sell stocks and funds inexpensively – often at no cost to customers.
These brokers concentrate fully on securities trading, usually only have a limited banking license or pass on your orders to specialist banks.
They also do not offer checking accounts or loans.
The pioneer of this type of offer is the company Flatex, today FlatexDegiro from Frankfurt, with 1.9 million customers according to their own statements the largest German broker.
In recent years, brokers have been pushing forward that allow securities transactions to be carried out entirely via cell phone.
Advantage of the concept: It is even cheaper and it is very easy with an app.
As an investor, you only need your reference account elsewhere, banking transactions from a single source are not yet possible.
With this strategy, Flatex is hot on the heels of the Berlin start-up Trade Republic, which has only been on the market for three years but already has more than a million customers.
Trade Republic offers the depot with the smartphone free of charge, also without a fee for deposits in the depot.
Each purchase or sale costs exactly one euro, savings plans run free of charge.
FlatexDeGiro had tried a small basic fee for deposits in the meantime, but abolished this fee after a year in view of the competitive situation, at least for ETFs and other funds (it remains for individual stocks).
The brokers Scalable Capital, Smartbroker and the new broker Finanzen.net_Zero from Axel Springer Verlag are also competing.
The aggressive price policy of the brokers has also triggered another price slide at the direct banks.
The depots were free at ING and DKB anyway.
Both banks recently reported around 2 million custody accounts.
But while they are trying to increase the fees for their customers' checking accounts, it is becoming even cheaper for the custody accounts.
In order to attract a broader and younger audience, ING, like many neo-brokers, offers all ETF savings plans free of charge, which means that there are no longer any purchase fees for the regular purchase of shares.
The DKB normally takes 1.50 euros per deposit, but always presents new special offers.
Consorsbank, a subsidiary of the major French bank BNP Paribas and Comdirect from Commerzbank, is also on the move.
The price war is very nice for customers at the moment, but should not lead to naivety.
Brokers and direct banks also want and need to make money.
You are currently trying to attract more customers who have money and who can later do other business with them.
The newcomers also want to make money
One of the most important tips is that hectic trading often brings worse results than investing with a steady hand - even if trading is cheap.
In the future, however, customers will have to reckon with the fact that fees will eventually be due.
As I said, the savings plans should definitely be geared to 10 to 20 years.
It is uncertain how the prices for investment services will develop over the period.
Reassuring: Shares and funds are always at your free disposal.
You can therefore move with them to another custody account provider at any time without any obstacles if the conditions should deteriorate at any time.
This is precisely why you as a customer should take the good price situation with you and see that you invest as much of your money as possible cost-effectively.
Every euro you save today stays saved.
For example, if you invest 200 euros a month in a savings plan, the deposit costs nothing, the deposit is also free and the return would be seven percent, you would have a good 102,000 euros in the account after 20 years.
If you had to pay a five percent front-end load each time you bought the securities, i.e. ten euros, it would end up being just over 97,000 euros.
If the storage in the depot would also cost a quarter percent of the investment amount every year, only 94,300 euros would remain.
So 8000 euros less.
And even with a one-off purchase, the bill is impressive:
A one-off purchase for 30,000 euros, for example, costs 80 euros at the Berliner Volksbank.
The issue surcharge of an in-house Union fund could be 1500 euros.
The annual custody costs are at least 88 euros.
After 20 years, after deducting the usual costs, the account would be around 106,000 euros.
Without the unnecessary deductions, it would be 116,000 euros for a broker.
As the bills show, the harmless-sounding fees add up to significant sums.
For 10,000 or 8,000 euros, it is definitely worth switching providers.
You'll never get that good hourly wage again.