EQ GIC | EQ Bank | Discussion forum

Found these details at EQ Bank: GIC's:

• $100 minimum.
• $100,000 maximum per GIC.
• Maximum 5 GIC's per customer.

* For GIC terms equal to one year, simple interest is calculated on a per annum basis and paid at maturity. For GIC terms of over one year, not including 15 and 27 month terms, interest is calculated on a per annum basis and, depending on the selection made at the time of purchase, paid either annually (simple interest) or at maturity (compounded annually). For GIC terms of 15 and 27 months, interest is calculated on a per annum basis, compounded annually and paid solely at maturity. In all cases, interest is accrued for the entire GIC term.

It says 5 gic limit and 100,000 limit in each one . Max 500,000

Just tried it now. The EQ Bank GIC web page is still there.

That rocks. I was waiting for EQ GICs.

No, I've never seen such a restriction. It makes it look like they are trying to push people into a tidy five year ladder @ 5 x 20-100K. But most people probably won't do that unless EQ should decide to market it that way.
I believe they also have a 100K limit on their savings account, so it is a consistent approach. With that limit, I thought their goal was to broaden their customer base as much as possible. This may still be the case.
They probably think that if you have more money than that, you should be or soon will be at a brokerage.

500K may be a maximum, but only 100K including any compounded interest is insured by CDIC. That 100K must also include whatever you keep there in a savings account or might keep there in future.
Since EQ offers the highest standard rate for savings, this may limit a lot of people, or at least provide them with a dilemma.
With EQ's stubborn refusal to provide joint accounts as another limitation, these GICs may not be as useful as they at first appear.
If you're maxed out here in emergency savings (or nearly so), then you don't have any insured room for these GICs.
Remember that during the Home Capital (Oaken) financial crisis last year, EQ seemed to be the next most vulnerable FI and took steps to bolster itself to ward off a run on savings.

Personally, I would not consider going over the CDIC limit with EQ, and, since I do use their savings account, there is not much room in this for me right now.

However, it's good to see more options emerging.

Just out of curiosity, are you people being presented with the same GIC rate deck that I was just flashed when I looked into it? (see attached partial screenshot).

I'm trying to assess whether different customers are shown different rates by the website

Bill said:

Same rates for me, same as gicjunkie originally posted. What makes you wonder whether different customers are being shown different rates?

Nothing specific, only that it's apparently becoming common practice nowadays to pitch different rates to different customers at the HISA level as a form of targeted marketing, so I figure somebody is eventually going to try to do it at the GIC level too

When EQ started up they spent a lot of dough on TV ads, etc and ended up with too much business at once. And when you go into their login page now it flogs their GICs. So maybe this time they're trying a more viral, no-cost approach and letting the business come in at a more relaxed pace. Plus maybe what they're really targeting, at least to begin, is people in their own HISAs that will move it to a locked-in product - maybe not a bad idea when rates are expected to increase.

So true about the goldfish birthday!