Vilja Solutions
Summary
Multi-source deposit funding is the practice of raising retail deposits across several markets, currencies and channels at the same time: branch, comparison portal, direct digital and embedded savings. German households hold roughly €3.4 trillion in cash and deposits, around €2 trillion of it earning under 0.5%. Two EU deadlines in 2027 decide which banks can reach it.
Deposit funding is no longer a home-market exercise. A multi-source deposit funding strategy raises savings across several markets, currencies and channels at once, branch, portal and digital, pricing each against the others. At House of Finance & Tech Berlin's Next Banking Summit 2026, a German-Nordic panel put a number on the prize: German households hold roughly €3.4 trillion in cash and deposits, most of it earning almost nothing. This article summarises what the Campus Masterclass hosted by Vilja Solutions at the Next Banking Summit 2026 established on 2 July 2026, and what it means for treasury and product teams.
A multi-source deposit funding strategy raises retail deposits from multiple markets, currencies and distribution channels in parallel, so a bank can shift volume toward whichever source is cheapest at any given moment. Vilja set out three taps a bank can open:
1. Existing non-digital channels: the branch network and relationship business a bank already has.
2. In-country portal channels: comparison and marketplace platforms such as CHECK24, Verivox and Raisin.
3. Own digital channels: a direct proposition deployed market by market. Vilja's deposit product currently covers Germany, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Poland and Italy.
The customer cases add a fourth pattern the slide did not name: embedded savings, where the deposit sits inside someone else's app or portfolio.
Fredrik Ulvenholm, CEO of Vilja, framed the logic with a live example. A Norwegian bank wanting to expand US dollar lending asked for a Norwegian krone savings product. Vilja's advise was to raise euros in Germany instead of paying up in the expensive NOK market. His argument was that the NOK/USD exchange rate is likely to be more volatile than EUR/USD, and euro interest rates also offer a more attractive funding environment.
Once deposits are treated as a sourcing problem rather than a branch-network problem, funding cost becomes a function of channel mix and onboarding friction, both of which a bank can actually manage. Wholesale funding offers no such choice: the price is set elsewhere.
Germany is the euro area's largest pool of household savings and one of its least mobile. Bundesbank figures show German households held around €3.4 trillion in cash and deposits at the end of 2024: 37.9% of their financial assets, and the single largest class they own. Florian Wedel, Managing Director Deposits at CHECK24, put the addressable share more sharply: roughly €2 trillion sitting below 0.5% interest, the money he called the sleepers.
"It's actually two trillion in idle cash." — Florian Wedel, MD Deposits, CHECK24
Bundesbank data supports the behaviour. Through 2025, German households kept moving money out of longer-dated term deposits into instantly available overnight accounts, because term-deposit rates fell faster than overnight rates as the ECB cut. In the fourth quarter of 2025 alone they added €63 billion in cash and sight deposits.
Achim Oelgarth, CEO of the Ostdeutscher Bankenverband (OstBV), added the cultural layer: Germany is a country of savers, not investors, and in his view that has to change. He also marked a milestone that frames German saver behaviour: the private banks' voluntary Einlagensicherungsfonds has existed since 1976, turning 50 in 2026, sitting on top of the statutory €100,000 guarantee rather than replacing it.
The financial wellbeing angle: the Bundesbank finds the less wealthy half of German households holds its financial assets almost entirely in deposits and insurance claims, and earned a negative real return through 2025. The idle €2 trillion is a household balance-sheet problem, not only a funding opportunity.
Two observations cut against easy optimism. Regina Rasmanis, COO of Swedish credit market company Myntro, described Germany as huge but "very, very competitive", with large American banks pricing smaller players out. Sebastian Ehlert, founder of Advice-and.de, argued that the guarantee scheme is a sanity check rather than a decision driver: rate and maturity do the real work.
The contrast landed in one line:
"In Sweden, they will call you. They will sanity check you. They might even come and knock on your door … In Germany, as long as you pay high interest, you will get the customer." — Regina Rasmanis, COO, Myntro
Fredrik Ulvenholm and Vilja CPO Mats Nordgren credited four structural enablers, with a fifth arriving:
• Digital identity. Sweden's Mobile BankID launched in October 2011. Onboarding a new savings customer now takes roughly 30 seconds, according to the Vilja speakers.
• Cashless by default. Cash has largely disappeared from Swedish retail life, removing the branch as a deposit-gathering asset.
• Cloud-first infrastructure. New products ship in weeks, not release cycles.
• Open banking in production, not as compliance: bill payments, embedded transfers, even gambling-risk signals in credit decisions.
• AI, which both described as on the verge rather than in production.
The order matters: digital identity is the foundation. Without frictionless identity verification there is no 30-second onboarding, and without that, deposit switching stays theoretical.
Each case below illustrates a different channel mechanic rather than a different technology.
Myntro shows why sourcing beats geography. It is a Swedish credit market company supervised by Finansinspektionen, buying and servicing non-performing loan portfolios and funding those purchases with retail deposits. Deposits are its raw material, so where they are cheapest is a first-order commercial question: Vilja's case study records six months from signing to go-live across Germany and Sweden.
One product detail deserves treasury attention. With Hoist Finance, Vilja built a coupon mechanism that pays bonus interest on the lowest balance of a period, usually a month, to stabilise overnight deposits without paying the term premium of a fixed-term product. Vilja says it is now standard in its savings product engine.
The panel's open question meets a fixed legal calendar, and the dates are closer than most of the room assumed.
Under eIDAS 2.0, Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, identity verification stops being each bank's own document-scanning problem and becomes shared EU infrastructure. Banking is explicitly in scope.
The calendar itself is short:
• May 2024: eIDAS 2.0, Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, entered into force.
• End of 2026: every EU member state must offer citizens at least one certified EU Digital Identity Wallet.
• 10 July 2027: the Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 applies directly in every member state.
• December 2027: banks and other organisations requiring strong user authentication must accept the wallet.
That matters because cross-border retail deposit switching is close to non-existent today. Passporting has existed for years; German savers still overwhelmingly stay put. Friction, not law, is the binding constraint, and the wallet attacks friction directly.
Whether savers actually move is the open variable. Mats Nordgren pointed to Sweden, where digital ID adoption jumped past 90% once the state routed everyday services such as tax filing through the digital channel: adoption has to be triggered, not waited for. Most German panellists expected movement on a three-year horizon.
The honest conclusion: the technology gap is closing faster than the behaviour gap, and the pool is large enough that a small shift is material. If 5% of Germany's idle deposits moved, that is roughly €100 billion in play.
The EU's Anti-Money Laundering Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2024/1624, is directly applicable from 10 July 2027, replacing 27 national interpretations with a single rulebook for customer due diligence, beneficial ownership and reporting. Supervision is centralising under the Authority for Anti-Money Laundering (AMLA), seated in Frankfurt and operational since 1 July 2025.
Achim Oelgarth framed this as a cost worth paying: a higher KYC and beneficial-owner bar in exchange for one genuinely reachable European market. Harmonisation work done for compliance in 2027 doubles as market-entry work, and it lands in the same window as the wallet acceptance obligation.
One structural constraint did not move. Deposits gathered through brokers and comparison portals count as less stable retail funding under EU liquidity rules, attracting higher assumed outflow rates in the liquidity coverage ratio. Portals stay a volume and speed instrument rather than a substitute for sticky direct relationships.
Asked from the floor about agentic commerce, Fredrik Ulvenholm confirmed Vilja is discussing an MCP interface so an AI agent could read balances and, eventually, move deposits. He named the risk plainly: automated rate-chasing could move billions in hours. His mitigation was deliberate friction, withholding interest for the first day or two, with banks as gatekeepers.
Mats Nordgren's framing was the more strategic one:
"Agentic access is the new web browser essentially." — Mats Nordgren, CPO, Vilja Solutions
Regina Rasmanis and Florian Wedel both pushed toward compliance limits, fraud controls and human-in-the-loop approval. Read-only agentic access is a near-term product question; agentic movement of deposits is a systemic-risk question regulators have not answered.
1. Price your channels separately. Establish the true all-in cost of your direct channel, each portal and each embedded partner, including deposit beta and liquidity treatment. Without that, multi-sourcing is guesswork and the net interest margin effect stays invisible.
2. Put the two 2027 deadlines on one roadmap. AMLR application and wallet acceptance hit the same teams in the same year.
3. Measure onboarding in seconds. It is the best proxy for whether you can compete for mobile deposits when the wallet lands.
4. Test stability mechanics before you need them. Lowest-balance coupons, tiering and sweeping are cheaper than term premiums.
5. Decide your agent posture now. Read-only, approval-gated or closed. Write it down before a partner decides for you.
• Deposits are a sourcing decision, not a geography. One ledger can serve branch, portal, direct and embedded channels across several countries.
• Germany's idle savings are the largest single prize in European retail funding, and on the Bundesbank's own numbers a financial wellbeing problem as much as a treasury opportunity.
• The window is 2026–2027, and it is legislated. Identity determines whether savers can move; harmonised rules determine whether banks can serve them when they do.
House of Finance & Tech Berlin convenes 70+ member organisations across banking, fintech, insurance and technology as Germany's official Fintech de:hub. Session context and the full programme are on the Next Banking Summit 2026 event page.
Next up: the FinWell Summit 2026 on 2 December at Backfabrik Berlin. Explore HoFT membership to join the ecosystem behind it.
What is multi-source deposit funding? Raising retail deposits across several markets, currencies and channels at once, branch, portal, direct digital and embedded, so volume can shift toward the cheapest source. It replaces reliance on a single home market.
How large is the German deposit opportunity? Bundesbank data put German household cash and deposits at roughly €3.4 trillion, 37.9% of total household financial assets. Panellists at HoFT's Next Banking Summit estimated around €2 trillion of that earns under 0.5%.
Why is cross-border deposit switching still rare in the EU? Passporting exists, but onboarding friction, identity verification and trust have kept savers in their home markets. The EU Digital Identity Wallet removes the friction; adoption speed remains the open variable.
When do the new EU identity and AML rules apply? Member states must offer an EU Digital Identity Wallet by the end of 2026, and banks must accept it from December 2027. The Anti-Money Laundering Regulation applies directly from 10 July 2027.
Are portal deposits treated differently from direct deposits? Yes. Broker and comparison-portal deposits count as less stable retail funding under EU liquidity rules and attract higher assumed outflow rates, which is why banks use them alongside, not instead of, a direct channel.
Can AI agents move customer deposits between banks today? Not at scale. Providers are exploring read-only agent access to balances, while automated transfers raise concentration, fraud and systemic-risk questions supervisors have not resolved.
• Deutsche Bundesbank, household financial assets and deposit behaviour: Q4 2024 and Q2 2025
• EU Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (EU) 2024/1624: EUR-Lex summary
• EU Digital Identity Wallet under eIDAS 2.0, Regulation (EU) 2024/1183: legal analysis of the 2026–2027 deadlines
• Deposit guarantee: Einlagensicherungsfonds and the Bundesbank's 50th anniversary address
• EBA guidelines on retail deposits subject to higher outflows
• Vilja Solutions case study on Myntro; Ostdeutscher Bankenverband
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