Quora Answer: What Bank Will Pay Me to Open an Account?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What bank will pay me to open an account?”

I would hardly consider this money free.  Banks may give you incentives for opening accounts with them, but these extra monies come with some strings attached, such as keeping a certain minimum sum for a specific period of time, or keeping the account for a certain period.  Compared to the amount required to open some of these accounts and the hold period relative to the interest offered, it may or may not be more than the opportunity cost elsewhere.

In any case, this should not be a primary consideration for opening such a bank account.  Interest rate, bank liquidity, and compliance, and accessibility of the funds are what we should look at.  Within a Singapore context, we also consider the fact that the Singapore Deposit Insurance covers the first $75,000 aggregated under that account name.  In that light, having more than one account spread over several banks makes sense if you have much more than that.