Tuesday, August 18, 2015

UOB One vs OCBC 360 - Interest

So, probably to compete with the OCBC 360 Account, UOB has launched its UOB One Account which has very similar criteria for bonus interest, and provides up to 3.33% per annum interest.

Yet, this 3.33% does not apply to all of your deposit - you get 1.5% on the first $10,000, 2% on the next $20,000 and 3.33% on the next $20,000. And everything above $50,000 only gets you 0.05%.

On the other hand, OCBC 360 gives you a flat 2.25% on everything from $0 to $60,000. Even though this is down from the old 3.05% one can still intuit that for certain amounts OCBC will still give you more interest.

I have taken the liberty of doing some calculations to find the sweet range (as it is a range, and not a spot) where UOB One will give you more interest than OCBC 360.

Assumptions for UOB One:
- You credit your salary to the account or perform 3 GIRO transactions
- You spend $500 on your UOB One card

Assumptions for OCBC 360:
- You credit your salary to the account
- You pay 3 bills online or through GIRO
- You spend $500 on OCBC Credit Cards

For OCBC 360 there're additional bonus categories of 1% for insuring or investing with OCBC and 1% on incremental account balances. However I am excluding these: the first because you need to insure/invest a substantial sum and the bonus lasts for only a year, and the second because it requires an increase in your balance each month and only applies to your incremental account balance, and only for a month at that (i.e. the 1% per annum works out to a measly 0.083%).

After some Excel wizardry, the sweet range is calculated to be between $41,574 and $54,136 - below or above this OCBC's 360 gets you more interest than UOB's One.
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