HSBC Direct 3.50% APY Promotion Extended

HSBC Direct is extending its 3.50% APY promotion by one more month. Are you in?

In early June, HSBC Direct rolled out a promotion for its online savings account with 3.50% APY. While the rate was decent, it’s only good till August 15, that’s less than one and a half months. I don’t really know how well the promotion has gone so far, but I have two reasons to believe that it won’t attract a lot of new customers:

1. The promotion period is too short: I doubt how much difference the 1.5 months 3.50% APY can make;
2. The rate is not good enough: There are quite a few banks offer better rates without an expiration date, such as EverBank: 4.76% APY three-month promotion and 3.51% ongoing APY (more on EverBank), FNBO Direct: 3.50% APY (more on FNBO), and Capital One: 3.50% APY (more in the list of interest rates).
   

Plenty of alternatives out there. If you ask me, then I’d rather get a $25 signup bonus (like what E*Trade Financial offered recently) to open a new account than having a promotion rate for only 1.5 months!

Anyway, HSBC Direct today announced that it’s extending the promotion period for one month to September 15. If you want to take advantage of this offer, you will get one more month for the 3.50% interest rate.

BTW, what do you see bank interest rate go from here? In recent months, a few banks (E*Trade Financial, FNBO, and WT Direct) have already started to raise their interest rates even when the Fed has kept its benchmark rate steady. However, this situation doesn’t seem to last long. On Tuesday, Philadelphia Fed President said in a speech that the U.S. central bank should raise interest rates “sooner rather than later.” (Bloomberg.com) If that’s the case, then we could see higher interest rates from online banks soon and that will make the offer from HSBC Direct even less appealing, even though nobody really expects the Fed to raise rate next month.

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