The UK’s Furness and Harpenden building societies have announced that they have signed up to compete for savers’ cash with Europe’s first and largest online interest rate auction house for time deposits, licuro.com.They make up seven UK societies that have signed up to the scheme that offers large lump sum investors the best time deposit rates available.
Licuro.com is a totally independent market place designed to bring together, on the one hand, UK savers looking for the highest interest rates for their time deposits and on the other hand banks and financial institutions looking to access alternative sources of funding and gain new customers.
A time deposit is an amount of money that you deposit in a deposit taker for an agreed period of time. For this the deposit taker pays you a certain time deposit interest rate. Licuro provides you with a quick and accurate overview of where you receive the best interest rate.
For instance, if you have say £50,000 to invest for three months, you can put your funds up for auction and recieve interest rate bids from some of the UK and Denmark’s most competetive financial institutions. With just a few clicks you will be able to find the best interest rate in the market for your deposit.
Since July, Licuro.com has processed over £20 million in the UK and two sister sites will be launched in Luxembourg and Belgium in February 2010 with Germany to follow in March 2010. It is expected that these new sites will see a rapid increase in traffic over the next 12 months. The original site in Denmark, mybanker.biz, founded in 2002, has processed the equivalent £1.4 billion in the last twelve months.
John Norden, CEO of Licuro.com in the UK and founder of mybanker.biz inDenmark says:
“We are delighted to see Licuro gaining momentum in the UK. We’ve a proven model in Denmark, which has translated very well to the UK although it is still very early days, and with the roll out elsewhere in Europe UK will in the long run give savers the option of depositing with banks in other European countries, with the obvious foreign exchange advantages.
From the savers’ perspective, Licuro is the site to go to if you have, say, £25,000 to invest (although the minimum accepted, which is set by deposit takers themselves, is currently £12,000 with no maximum). We offer savers a totally transparent way of depositing their money at an interest rate that is pushed up by the competition created by the several building societies, each with their own distinct liquidity requirements, bidding for their cash online in real-time.”
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