When a bank fails, we make sure that account holders can quickly regain access to their money. Effective 1 January 2024, this will take no more than seven working days. Back in 2009, it was three months.
The Dutch Deposit Guarantee protects account holders of Dutch banks up to €100,000 per person per bank. If a bank fails, we make sure that the protected money of affected account holders is transferred to their their accounts. The last time this occurred was in April 2022, when Amsterdam Trade Bank (ATB) was declared bankrupt at its own request. We handled the situation adequately and quickly at the time, but we have also learned a few lessons and have optimised our processes.
First, you can watch the video to learn more about the process:
We do not need to activate the deposit guarantee scheme very often, which is why we would like to tell you more about how things work and how we make sure we are prepared for the future.
On the third working day after ATB's bankruptcy, account holders could provide the account number where they wanted to receive their compensation. In this way, we ensured that their compensation was available within seven working days. This quick pay-out was possible because of the detailed preparations we make on a daily basis. In addition, we worked closely with ATB staff, who provided all the customer data we needed. This helped us establish the identities of account holders and the amounts in their accounts. After processing the customer files, we made the web portal available where account holders could provide their account numbers, and transferred their compensation amounts. Within a month of ATB’s bankruptcy, 80% of account holders had submitted a bank account number, and we had paid out 95% of the total guaranteed amount in savings.
From 1 January 2024, the payout period specified by law has been reduced to seven working days. To achieve this, we have prescribed what data banks must submit to us in the unfortunate event that they go bankrupt. For their part, banks have in recent years improved their accounting records and increased the quality of their customer data, so that they can quickly provide us with all the information we need.
Read more about the DGS compensation for ATB and our DGS pay-out organisation in the fact sheet.
More information on the Dutch Deposit Guarantee can be found here: Dutch Deposit Guarantee (dnb.nl)
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