Partitioned/Virtual Bank accounts?

seamus

Any financial institutions offer anything like this in Ireland?

Basically the idea is that you have a bank account with a single bank account number, but then within that account you can split it internally to divide your money up to help you manage it.

So you might have a "savings" partition on the account where you transfer money in and out as you save or spend it. It's purely to assist you in managing your own money - all money coming into and out of the account goes through a "primary" partition, and from the bank's point of view you just have one account with a single figure in it. But from your point of view you can divide your money into meaningful partitions.

The obvious benefit is that you don't have to maintain multiple bank accounts along with the various charges that incurs, as well as the wait times you get when transferring money around.

It's only something I've seen implemented in software, but I do know that it's offered in some countries (like Germany) for business customers. I was just wondering if anyone heard of anything like this for consumers in Ireland?

homer911

When you open a Savings Account with Rabodirect, they let you open up to two more (immediately, within their online banking application), that you can rename for example as Holiday Fund or College Fund

Deposit interest on all accounts is combined and credited to the primary account

Random

its not exactly what you want but with ulster bank i have an online savings account and a current account. i can transfer money instantly between the two online, over the phone and via android app.

i also have a similiar setup between an aib current account and aib online savings account.

dotsman

This is actually how bank accounts work already! Not sure if it's the exact same for every bank, but I'm with AIB and how it works is that the nsc identifies the bank and branch, first 5 digits of the account number are your "number line", and the last 3 digits are the specific account identifier.

Basically, if you have account 112222 12345678, the
11 identifies the bank (ie AIB/BOI)
2222 identifies the branch
12345 identifies your number line in that branch
678 identifies the specific account.

So, although you may have several different "number lines" in a branch, no 2 customers will have the same "number line" so, if you have only 1 account, the 12345 is all you need to identify it. After that, you can have up to a thousand accounts on that number line and use them for whatever you want.

These accounts are now grouped together in terms of grading, offsetting interest, funds retrieval etc, however different banks may treat this differently. Transferring funds between them is always instant (but so is transferring funds to any account within the same bank)

Typically, they are only used by businesses as it's just hassle unless you really need it.

What exactly are you looking to do? Is it that you want to save for different things and divide up the overall savings figure between various "projects"? If so, a simple excel spreadsheet should track that for you.