Roel van Veggel talks about RaboDirect’s many positives in this current market!

Submitted by Roel van Veggel on Tuesday 7 October  2008

Every day at RaboDirect we receive calls and e-mails from our customers, investors and non customers who are looking for the safest place to invest their hard earned cash. As you can probably imagine, with the recent turmoil in the financial markets and the global banking crisis, the volume of enquiries we've received recently has increased dramatically.

When I talk to my peers in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, their experiences are similar. The levels of enquiries have translated into a 500% increase in the number of people opening accounts with our sister businesses in these countries. Also here in Ireland we saw a healthy increase in new customer applications. And so clearly Rabobank's status as the safest privately-owned bank in the world is absolutely resonating with Irish depositors.

Our Safety

Now that many European governments are increasing their guarantees and are taking other measures to restore confidence in the banks, it is a good time to put issues such as safety and reliability into perspective:

RaboDirect, part of the Rabobank Group, has a rating that deems it as stable as the Irish Government.  We have held our AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor's and Moody's for the past 27 years. As a Dutch owned bank regulated by the Dutch Central Bank, we are not exposed to the issues and challenges of the Irish Banking system or to the construction and property industries, unlike the Irish banks. Moreover, the Rabobank Group recently reported interim results for 2008 which showed a 12% increase ahead of targets for the first six months of 2008. The total balance size of our group is approx €570 billion which makes it, on its own, bigger than the whole guarantee package for the Irish banks. Indeed, our assets are greater than that of the six Irish banks included in this guarantee combined!

On top of that, it is good to realise that Rabobank is not stock listed, so we are not at the mercy of speculators, short sellers and the like. We are, and have always been, in the position to have long term views and commitments. We're about stability, predictability and trust. Simple as that...

Some Questions

In the past few weeks, callers to RaboDirect have been asking the following questions:
 
• How safe is RaboDirect and the Rabobank Group?
• What is Rabobank's exposure to the US sub-prime market?

Like many people, I prefer to hear the answers to these and other questions straight from the horse's mouth and in the interests of fulfilling that need, I strongly recommend that you pay a visit to the Rabobank Investor Relations site.  Here you'll  hear from Bert Bruggink (CFO - Rabobank Group). Bert talk's about our interim results and provides his view on the current turmoil.

Looking Ahead

We saw the first co-ordinated actions of the European ministers of Finance I expect to make sure the level playing field in the European banking world will be restored. Governments need to harmonize their protection and guarantee system to prevent further confusion in the market, unfair competition and movement of money to other countries. The recent unlimited guarantee for some, but not all banks in Ireland had effectively moved the goal posts in terms of competiveness for all banks operating in the Irish market and this, for the sake of the 60,000 Irish customers we hold at RaboDirect, needs to be redressed.

Rest assured that with the solid position that Rabobank has, we at RaboDirect will continue to offer you banking the way it's supposed to be: simple, accessible, transparent with decent rates and prudent risk management.  

We're very conscious that many of our 60,000 Irish customers came to us because of these unique benefits and our fresh approach to banking in Ireland. We value our customers and are absolutely confident that we will continue to keep their best interests at the core of everything we do at RaboDirect going forward.  Nothing has changed for us in that regard and we are extremely positive about the future.

September 2008 Press Release:

10 years as the world's safest bank

August 2008 Press Release:

Rabobank: A Safe Place to Land