Methodology

What is included

• Euro savings products for private individuals living in the Netherlands: instant-access savings accounts, notice accounts, term deposits, and cash at brokers or neobanks as far as that money is actually held as a bank deposit.
• The balance must fall under a statutory European deposit guarantee scheme. Money market funds, securities, crypto and loans are not included.
• An offer only appears once we have verified the deposit guarantee of the institution that holds the money. Until then it stays out of the comparison.

Checking the deposit guarantee

• For every institution we record the legal name, country, scheme, guarantee limit, the source of the check and its date. Those are shown on the bank page.
• Raisin partner banks: Raisin publishes the statutory guarantee details per bank. We match that disclosure to our register of European schemes every day.
• Banks with a direct offer are checked by hand against the register of the supervisor or the guarantee scheme, with the date of the last check.
• Broker and neobank cash is modelled in layers, for example the first €50,000 at a partner bank and the rest in a money market fund. Only the bank deposit layer within the limit counts as protected for your amount.
• Brands that share one banking licence are marked, so you are warned when you combine two products on one licence.

Where the rates come from

1. The bank's own website is decisive for direct offers.
2. Raisin's product catalogue is decisive for every Raisin offer, including each term, minimum, maximum, payout and guarantee details. New banks and terms appear automatically; products that disappear are retired after a few missed runs.
3. Supervisors and guarantee schemes only for guarantee facts.

Bank websites are read every 30 minutes, the Raisin catalogue every 1 hour. A failed run leaves the last known valid rate in place. A rate that is not confirmed by its source for a few days is hidden until it is. Every change becomes a new line in the rate history; nothing is overwritten.

Dutch comparison sites are read as well, but only to check us: they never set a rate. When one of them quotes a different rate than the bank's own page, that disagreement is recorded and looked at by hand. Often the bank changed its page and we were a few hours behind; sometimes the other site has been wrong for months. In the second case the judgement is recorded with its evidence and the disagreement stays quiet until that site changes its figure.

How the return is calculated

• When a provider places the money at partner banks of its choosing (Trade Republic, Scalable Capital with PRIME+, Revolut), we count the statutory guarantee of those banks as the provider describes it: spread over up to five banks, up to 5 × € 100,000. The provider decides which bank holds your money, so other balances at that bank count towards the limit; we say so. Without PRIME+, Scalable may hold the money in money-market funds, which does not count as guaranteed. A provider’s own banking licence does not establish the receiving bank’s guarantee.
• Interest accrues per month over the balance at the start of the month and is credited according to the product's payout frequency. Credited interest then earns interest itself.
• Tiers are applied as the bank applies them: per tier, or over the whole balance. Above a "rate up to €X" cap the excess earns nothing. Below the minimum or above the maximum an offer drops out of the list by default. Minimums, maximums and whether an account needs a payment account at the same bank are read from the bank's own product page in its own words; what a bank does not state anywhere is shown as not stated, never as "none".
• A promotional rate counts only for its duration and up to its cap; the rest of the period and amount earns the base rate. A promotion the bank runs without an end date (Trade Republic) is calculated over the whole period; the product page, and the note behind the promotional rate in the comparison, say that the bank may change or stop it at any time. When a bank names neither a duration nor an end date, we show a clearly labelled twelve-month assumption; the actual return may be lower. Promotions with an end date are prorated within the last month, including the end day.
• Interest paid out along the way counts as money in hand; the comparable annual rate assumes you reinvest it at the same rate.
• Deposits show the total gross interest over the real term plus an effective annual rate to compare terms. Variable rates are calculated as if they stay the same for the whole period.
• Fees we know are deducted pro rata. The default order is the expected return on your amount, never the advertised rate. All arithmetic uses exact decimals on the server.

Rates a bank has already announced

Banks often publish a new rate weeks before it applies ("from 1 October: 2.40%"). We read that announcement and show it next to the current rate, marked with its date; the calculation still uses the rate that applies today. On the day itself our rate must follow. If it does not, the announcement stays on an internal list until someone has looked at the bank's page, because a bank that changed its mind and a parser that missed the new number look identical on a comparison site.

Withholding tax

Per country we record the standard rate, the rate a Dutch saver pays after the treaty procedure or whether it can be reduced to 0%, and which formalities that takes. Countries we only know from secondary sources are marked as not verified. Dutch box 3 tax is deliberately not modelled as a tax on interest.

How the site earns money

Clicking through to a bank goes via our own redirect link ("Open account") so we can count anonymously which offers are visited; no IP address or browser data is stored. For some banks that link earns an affiliate fee; those links are marked as advertising links (rel="sponsored"). Fees have no influence on the inclusion, calculation or order of offers: those follow solely from the rate conditions, your amount and the deposit guarantee.

Limits

Bank websites that refuse automated access are not circumvented; such a source is switched off. No language model interprets rates or guarantee facts: every extraction is deterministic and can be traced back to the source page. Errors are still possible; the bank's own conditions are decisive before you open an account.