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International students continuing their higher education studies in Germany can no longer open a blocked bank account with Deutsche Bank, which up until 2016, has been the only provider of such services in Germany.

According to , the bank quietly stopped providing this service on July 1 this year, and the German Foreign Office has removed the same from the list of blocked bank account providers for Germany.

The bank has confirmed that it no longer provides the service while responding to a student asking on Twitter if he could still open an account at Deutsche Bank for his visa application.

“Unfortunately, Deutsche Bank does not offer student blocked accounts,” is said in the response, advising the same student to check with the German Foreign Office for other providers.

Among the banks that are certified in Germany for offering such services is also Expatrio, which is a digital Blocked Account provider. The same had started offering the service in 2018, just two years after the first banks, aside from Deutsche Bank, started entering the market.

To open a blocked bank account with Expatrio, students must pay a €49 account opening fee and a monthly fee of €5. They can complete all the procedures online and do not need to go to the embassy to complete the opening of such a bank account.

On the contrary, the procedures for opening a blocked bank account with Deutsche Bank have been much longer, bureaucratic, and complicated. Students not only had to collect several documents and personally send them to the German embassy in their country of residence, but they also had to wait for weeks until all these procedures were finished.

Moreover, once in Germany, they could not activate their bank account and start withdrawing money before registering their address in the country.

According to analysts at , one of the reasons why Deutsche Bank stopped offering this service is because they could not keep up with the competition, after in 2016 many other banks entered the market offering completely digitalized procedures.

“When other banks started offering the service of blocked bank accounts, due to their facilitated procedures, Deutsche Bank slowly became less favoured by students, who instead turned to banks that had more digitalized procedures,” they claim in this regard.

A blocked bank account is an account opened in one of the banks in Germany which are approved by the state to offer such services, in which a student has to deposit a specified amount of money as proof that the same can support themselves during their studies in Germany. This proof usually needs to be presented when a non-EU citizen applies for a German student visa, and it is one of the most important requirements for obtaining a visa to study in Germany.

Once in Germany, the student can withdraw a specified monthly amount to use for their daily expenses. A student can withdraw less money than that, but not more, and that is the reason why these types of accounts are called blocked bank accounts.

However, after 2016, several banks started offering the same service, digitalizing the procedures, and making it way much easier to open such an account from the home country of a non-EU applicant in Germany.

Previously, Studying-in-Germany.org had warned that the German authorities could increase the amount required for opening a blocked bank account for international students in Germany from €10,332 as it currently is to €11,172 so that the amount students would be able to withdraw monthly would increase from €861 to €931, but such a thing has not happened yet.

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