Where do you have your money saved for getting higher interest?

Stage of life dictates a lot. AVCs are out if you're retiring.

Not hard having €400k-€500k if a married couple have each received retirement lump sums, transferred the majority of a lifetime's saving and investment to more risk averse cash options, and perhaps came into an inheritance.

My assumption (and one which I would confirm before depositing any money) is that they are a merely just a middleman. So that you are not giving your money to raisin who promise to deposit it in the bank for you and pass on the return, but that they merely link you up with the bank. You would be the bank's customer, not raisin acting as some kind of agent for you. There could obviously still be some residual risk if you have to transfer money through Raisin rather than directly to the destination bank itself, but I don't know whether that is how it is done or whether they just give you the IBAN for the destination account and you wire it directly.

Their website mentions the guarantee in the context that it would be amalgamated with other amounts you had on deposit at that institution. e.g. if you already have 50k on deposit with bank X in Germany and you put in 60k through Raisin into the same bank, you would be over the guarantee limit. So I would infer from that that my assumption above in relation to who "owns" the account is correct. If it were all under Raisin, then the guarantee would be virtually worthless as they'd likely have large amounts deposited in some institutions.

I'm not advocating for them. I only learned about them on another thread a few days ago and read their website and though it was an interesting concept. I mean with all the EU rules, it should be something that we can do easily. We shouldn't be restricted just to Irish banks

I don't know about fees. Those aren't mentioned. Maybe if you register with them you are told. Tax implications are on their website. At least information as regards withholding taxes. But I think the standard thing would be that you send them a residency certificate from Ireland and they don't deduct it. If they still deducted it, if there was a DTT then that would be deducted from your DIRT liability presumably anyway. I would imagine that within the EU, that they won't deduct it anyway.

(Of course, I was a bit ambiguous in my example above but in case I confuse anyone, the guarantee is not per country but per person per covered institution)

Ok it make sense if you talking about retired people who doesn’t need to take risk.

Ptsb actually have one of the best rates at the moment - 0.75% AER on 18 months fixed rate deposit.

33% of which goes to DIRT.

Capital is expensive to set aside so I'd imagine most places don't set aside much more than is required. I never worked anywhere with a retail banking arm so I don't know about that side of things but was under the impression that more emphasis is being placed on the likes of NSFR and LCR the last few years. On the trading side of things, a spread would be implicitly priced into derivatives to take into account the cost.

Nowhere keeps 100% of liabilities as reserves. The reserves are to help the bank deal with an unexpected situation but would not cover everything in the event of a catastrophic meltdown of that institution. In which case the depositor is not guaranteed to get all their money back. The credit rating is still of some use to the consumer as a proxy (albeit not guaranteed to be 100% accurate) as to the overall financial health of the institution. It's sort of a cyclic argument to define it in terms of ability to raise on the markets.

(And the counterexample where the normal rating<->yield logic was broken anyway would be when US was downgraded a few years back and Treasury yields went down. Obviously that was sovereign debt so different things at play there and the reasons that occurred would not be relevant for commercial banks.)

That's a mistake by bonkers. PTSB Fixed Term deposit accounts are most definitely subject to DIRT: https://www.permanenttsb.ie/saving-and-investing/deposit-accounts/fixed-term-deposit-account/

For the number of accounts, I recall a statement from the Central Bank a couple of years ago which said that there was 1,776 deposit accounts in Ireland with a balance of €1 million or more. I remember the number because it's a significant date in US history.

How many accounts have more than 500K? Your guess is as good as mine but it could be anything up to 10,000, especially in the aftermath of Covid when people spent far less on new cars and foreign holidays.

As to the total amount on deposit, as of June 2022, Irish deposit accounts amounted to more than 130 billion euros. Go to the link below and click on the first Table A.18 (opens a CSV file), the number is in the righthand column 'Total Deposits'...

https://www.centralbank.ie/statistics/data-and-analysis/credit-and-banking-statistics/private-household-credit-and-deposits

And that's over 65s with income below the 'annual exemption limit' which really is quite low.

https://www.revenue.ie/en/additional-incomes/dirt/who-is-exempt-from-dirt.aspx

I have used Raisin for years and all has gone well. Currently have deposits with 4 banks via Raisin.

Regarding your questions:

• There are no fees.
• The tax rate varies from zero (Italy and France are zero who a lot of the offers are with) to a reduced withholding tax rate (in most other countries) or full withholding tax. But if you pay tax in the local country, you then pay less DIRT when completing your tax return because the tax you have already paid, in most cases, is deductible against your DIRT liability. If you want simplicity, then use a French or Italian bank and then declare the gross interest to the revenue via your tax return.
• The deposit guarantee is per person per bank.
• You get holdings statements and documentation to back up your deposit. Raisin is a regulated bank and the final banks are all regulated too. Raisin now has significant deposits placed across Europe, in particular in Germany. Your money is where they say it is.

Raisin is an easy way to get a decent return for your deposits with a state deposit guarantee provided you keep deposits below 100k per bank.

Raisin are authorised by the Central Bank of Ireland as a credit institution that is authorised to carry out banking business in the State. The reason that Raisin arrived in Ireland long after other countries is it took years for the CBI to issue this authorisation.