1822direkt Referral Code

1822direkt runs a rate card by product rather than a flat per-person bonus — the premium ranges from €20 to €100 depending on what your friend opens, and the two savings tiers require a €5,000 deposit from them.

1822direkt runs a rate card by product rather than a flat per-person bonus, which is a different instrument from a bounty paid per friend. Per the bank's own Kunden-werben-Kunden page, the premium depends on what your friend opens: up to €100 for GiroDirekt, the current account; €100 for a Wertpapierdepot securities account; €40 for Tagesgeld instant-access savings; and €20 for a Festgeld fixed-term deposit.

The two savings tiers carry a condition that is not in any headline figure: the referred person must bring at least €5,000. So the €40 is not €40 for an introduction — it is €40 for an introduction plus a five-thousand-euro deposit from somebody else. That is a large ask disguised as the smallest number on the card.

Three things follow from the shape of that card, and they generalise to any tiered referral scheme. First, the headline figure is the top tier, and the top tier is the hardest to reach — a flat "€X per friend" is a promise about people, while a rate card is a promise about products, and you are paid for whichever one your friend actually opens, usually the simplest and cheapest. Second, the card pays most for steering someone into investing: the joint-largest premium is for a securities account, five times the fixed-deposit rate. A securities account is the right product for some people and the wrong one for others, and the premium knows nothing about which — if the current account is what you would have suggested anyway, suggest the current account. Third, "up to €100" on the current account means there are conditions; where a bank writes "up to", it is worth asking what the lower rungs are before quoting the top figure to a friend.

Two restrictions decide whether the referral can be used at all. You must already be a customer — "Kunden werben Kunden" means customers recruiting customers, and it is not open to the public or run as an affiliate programme. And 1822direkt operates in Germany: the account, the scheme and the referral link are all German-market products. Premiums are also not instant; they follow the account being opened and any conditions being met.

There is a separate point that matters more than the premium, and it puts this store in a different category from most of the banking apps on this site: 1822direkt is an actual bank, and its deposit protection is of a kind this site has not previously described. It is a subsidiary of Frankfurter Sparkasse and belongs to the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe's institutional protection scheme — an institutsbezogenes Sicherungssystem made up of the regional savings-bank support funds, the Landesbanken's security reserves and the Bausparkassen fund — officially recognised as a deposit guarantee system under the German Einlagensicherungsgesetz (EinSiG) since 3 July 2015.

The distinction is subtle and worth getting right, because it is a fourth answer to "is my money safe" rather than simply a bigger version of the third. An ordinary deposit guarantee reimburses the depositor after a bank fails. An institutional protection scheme is designed to support the institution so that it does not fail in the first place — the compensation event is avoided rather than paid out. The practical consequence for a customer is continuity: the account keeps working, rather than being closed and repaid. And behind it the statutory position still stands: if institutional protection were not to apply, the ordinary legal claim of €100,000 per depositor remains.

That completes a ladder worth having in mind for any account anywhere: a fintech front-end is not a bank — the money sits at a partner bank, protection attaches to the partner, and the limit is per depositor per bank rather than per app. An e-money or payments firm safeguards the money, holding it apart from its own funds — real protection, but no scheme tops up a shortfall. A bank carries a statutory deposit guarantee, €100,000 per depositor per bank across the EU, paid even if the bank's money is gone. And institutional protection is a scheme designed so that the guarantee never has to pay. None of that is a reason to take the referral — it is a reason to know which of the four applies at every app and bank you use.