Benefits of having multiple bank accounts

Posted by Felix Okoli on Monday July 7, 2014 at 10:25:47:

Some people have multiple bank accounts for saving their money; it may be a different type of account in the same bank or it may be different accounts in different banks.

One can have a savings and a current account in the same bank or have the same type of account in more than one bank.
To them, it is better to spread their earning across different banks rather than keeping all of one's money in just one bank.

Are there any benefits of having multiple bank accounts? Well, we'll look into that in a bit.

Her are some of the benefits of multiple bank accounts:

1. Multiple banking benefits: The first benefit of having multiple bank accounts is that it gives you the benefits of enjoying multiple banking benefits for the different accounts. Using a fixed deposit account for instance, different banks have their different interest rate, and maybe you have enough money to invest and two banks are offering you a high interest rate, you can decide to split your money into two and open a fixed deposit account with the two banks.

2. To get a full insurance cover: Secondly, you can save your money confidently in multiple accounts, knowing fully well that all the banks cannot go bankrupt at the same time. But this is a problem if you are saving all your money in one single account in the same bank. There have been instances where people suffered major losses because the bank they had all their savings with went bankrupt. Though now, Central Bank of Nigeria policies can insured that banks now have strong capital bases, which was the reason why banks that didn’t have strong capital bases had to merge with others. However there is still a limit to the amount of money insured by the insurance companies like the NDIC and so people feel safer spreading their assets in several banks.

3. Different levels of customer service: The kind of customer service one gets from a particular bank can be different from what you get from other banks. For instance, some banks waste a lot of time and keep customers standing for over 30 minutes just to make deposits while for other banks, it's only 5 minutes. People love going to banks that save their time and so it's better for them to try out banks that have better customer service than others.

4. Free services: Some banks offer certain basic services for free while others charge for it. If one has just one bank account, chances are that he won't know what he is missing but people with several bank accounts know which banks charge them for what and which ones don't and hence stick to it. Some banks offer free services and no charges on things like making deposits, withdrawals or getting sms alerts.