Swedish digital bank Northmill brings novel savings account to market

While not earth-shattering, tight integration between credit card cashback and savings makes this a sweet deal.

Sweden’s Northmill Bank has introduced a free savings account just two months after launching its Rebilla credit card in December.

Northmill plan, as outlined when Rebilla first launched, is to offer 2 per cent cashback on its credit card with no interest, and soon let customers automatically transfer cashback into this new savings account.

While hardly a best-in-class savings account, at just 0.6 per cent interest, the tight integration with the 2 per cent credit rewards becomes an impressive deal.

“Our technical capacity also allows us to connect all Rebilla products into one powerful banking offering,” said Marcin Ziolkowski, Rebilla’s Product Owner for its Reserve savings account.

Spending 10,000 Swedish Krona (£800) a month for 12 months could see a potential benefit of 2,414.40 Krona (£195.2) over the course of a year.

Another example of the integration is what Rebilla calls Reduce, which consolidates existing credit debt with Rebilla at a lower interest rate just by scanning existing bills.

What Northmill is building in its Swedish bank is clearly an impressive technological feat, not only launching these financial products but also creating smart reasons why you would move your credit card, savings accounts and previous credit debt over to them.

However, as we’ve seen with Tandem this week, sometimes all that glitters is not gold and sometimes initially free or lucrative services need to be scaled back once it becomes clear they are no longer sustainable.

Hopefully the team at Northmill, led by CEO Hikmet Ego, are building a bank with longevity for the future and not just perks for the present.