EQ Bank

This post is to review the savings accounts of EQ Bank. Over the years I have tried to find a reasonable High Interest Savings account for any temporary or long term savings I might have. Things like an emergency fund are best kept liquid (in my opinion) in a vanilla account. I have tried quite a few out and ran across EQ Bank mainly because they were one of the first cloud core banking (which is what I work in) and they used the Temenos core. They were written up here.

In any event they do have pretty good savings rates , and had an interesting 3 month GIC rate that was pretty attractive. Their longer term GIC rates weren’t great, but that’s fine.

Sign Up

The sign up was pretty painless as they use Plaid which connected to my Tangerine account quickly and easily. My First Calgary Credit Union account is not available in Plaid, but hurrah they had a manual connection option. I entered my transit, branch and account manually, then EQ made a couple of micro deposits. I entered these into the EQ site a couple days later and voila I was connected. For interest you can also connect your high interest savings accounts together, like to Implicity, to speed the move of money to better rates

Account Features

Since then I moved some savings in which I plan to split into 2 90 day terms 45 days apart just so I have quicker access to half if it was ever needed. One feature I really like is it shows the interest earned in your GIC as of the night before.

There were a few things I would improve. There is no way to auto renew a GIC, which would be much better and is pretty standard for sites.

The account has a few other good features including free eTransfers, no minimum balance and cheaper international transfers. It also has the ability to pay bills, so could be a pretty robust overall account for saving for a larger annual fee (i.e. life insurance) or to put a bonus in and then pay certain bills or eTransfers from.

Mobile App

The site is well designed and I would say a pretty robust mobile app with all the information you need and the ability to deposit cheques.

Referral

Like many new services EQ Bank offers a referral program. Why not use mine here! If you use it we both get $20

Overall

I have moved the bulk of our savings to EQ Bank so I guess I had better give it 5 stars! We’ll see how it goes over the coming months, but for now it seems great.