Multiple accounts with various banks in Germany

1) Is it possible to have multiple bank accounts with various banks in Germany (i.e.: Sparkasse and Citibank)?

2) Is there any effect on your credit rating (SCHUFA) if you were to have multiple current accounts?

Please post relevant forum messages/topics if applicable. Thanks!

1) yes its possible and not at all difficult

2) no it doesn't affect your credit rating
You only get problems with SCHUFA if you don't pay bills or somehow get into debt

Simply having two or more accounts will have no affect on your credit rating.

However having loans, overdrafts or similar from two or more banks may have, as will as any suspicious moving around of money or sudden appearances of "magic" money in your accounts.

Thats what I was thinking, as long as the accounts are in good standing order (no overdrafts) all should be ok. Thanks for the responses!

many of the banks offer giro (current) accounts that are either free or very cheap. But these usually come with a condition that there are regular monthly installments, either from your salary, rental income or other sources. So if you want to open multiple accounts it may start costing a bit more for the second account onwards, unless you have different sources of income and can stream them into each account.

It's quite useful having accounts with more than one bank. For example, when I was trying to get a loan for my house. My first bank "no" and my second bank gave me the loan.

SCHUFA is not a rating but a list of your commitments as entered by the people you are, were or will be indebted to. Having multiple bank accounts depends on who is reviewing the data, for what reason and how they interpret it. Multiple banks could be considered as both prudent or reckless depending on your point of view and your commitment to each. I have many banks and many credit cards all of which are listed on my SCHUFA record and never had any problems. Even debts are not an issue if they are being managed correctly.

You should have tried other banks - many may have even beaten the other offers to get the business.

I have multiple accounts and never had a problem. I think I had three or four giro accounts at one point, until I closed two, so now I have two left.

While your SCHUFA rating will certainly be very bad if you're in debt, it is not really known how their ratings are created in detail. I suppose that the number of bank accounts plays a role if they think there is a statistical relationship. I'd say the rating surely is influenced if these accounts can be overdrawn.

Rumors have it they also consider your nationality, family name, and place of residence in their ratings, but usually not so much that eg banks won't allow you at least one credit card (unless your in debt).

SCHUFA IS NOT A RATING! It's a factual list of your financial dealings and commitments. Some financial services use SCHUFA information to determine their own rating, but that's internal to them.

Ignore YL6's last post. SCHUFA does scoring/rating. Here is the relevant section from the German wikipedia article:

Don't ignore me totally. Neither of us is totally right. Neither of us is totally wrong.
Since April 2007 (which is why it was new to me) SCHUFA do a offer "basis-score", but not to anyone else, only to the person to whom it belongs, to help you judge your overall rating with other institutions. They also offer alternative scores to different industries. This scoring is different per industry and is actually developed with the industry concerned based on different factors of your SCHUFA data, relevant to the industry concerned, which includes private banks, public banks, loan banks, mail-order companies, telecommunications companies, or score as an independent trader yourself. Weighting for the score can be influenced by many things, including lack of data overall. This goes some ways to explain why people may be refused mobile phone contracts for no apparent reason, even though they may think their credit status is good. In most cases, SCHUFA do not provide the score value direct to the trader, but provide empirical data on the consumer from which they calculate their own score according to their own algorithm - for this reason many traders may not make their own determined score available to an applicant, as their formula for its calculation is confidential to them.
Most important of all - you can specifically request the SCHUFA does not pass on your score to a third-party (but you can't stop them accessing your base data)