International Students Can No Longer Open a Blocked Bank Account at Deutsche Bank

Deutsche Bank, which was the only institution in Germany offering this service until 2016, is no longer able to create restricted bank accounts for foreign students pursuing higher education there.

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On July 1st of this year, the bank reportedly ceased offering this service covertly, according to BlockedAccountGermany.com. The German Foreign Office has also taken the bank off of its list of banned bank account providers for Germany.

In response to a student who inquired on Twitter about whether he could still create an account with Deutsche Bank in order to submit an application for a visa, the bank acknowledged that it no longer offers the service.

The statement states, “Unfortunately, Deutsche Bank does not offer student blocked accounts.” The student is then advised to inquire about other providers with the German Foreign Office.

Digital Blocked Account provider Expatrio is also certified by the German authorities to provide these services. Two years after the first banks, excluding Deutsche Bank, entered the market, the same company began providing the service in 2018.

Students must pay an account starting charge of €49 and a monthly fee of €5 to create a blocked bank account with Expatrio. To finish the establishment of such a bank account, they may execute all the steps online and do not need to visit the embassy.

On the contrary, the procedures for opening a blocked bank account with Deutsche Bank have been much longer, bureaucratic, and complicated. Students not only had to collect several documents and personally send them to the German embassy in their country of residence, but they also had to wait for weeks until all these procedures were finished.

Moreover, once in Germany, they could not activate their bank account and start withdrawing money before registering their address in the country.

According to analysts at BlockedAccountGermany.com, one of the reasons why Deutsche Bank stopped offering this service is because they could not keep up with the competition, after in 2016 many other banks entered the market offering completely digitalized procedures.

“When other banks started offering the service of blocked bank accounts, due to their facilitated procedures, Deutsche Bank slowly became less favoured by students, who instead turned to banks that had more digitalized procedures,” they claim in this regard.

A blocked bank account is an account opened in one of the banks in Germany which are approved by the state to offer such services, in which a student has to deposit a specified amount of money as proof that the same can support themselves during their studies in Germany. This proof usually needs to be presented when a non-EU citizen applies for a German student visa, and it is one of the most important requirements for obtaining a visa to study in Germany.

Once in Germany, the student can withdraw a specified monthly amount to use for their daily expenses. A student can withdraw less money than that, but not more, and that is the reason why these types of accounts are called blocked bank accounts.

However, after 2016, several banks started offering the same service, digitalizing the procedures, and making it way much easier to open such an account from the home country of a non-EU applicant in Germany.