How we're using your deposits
The money you place on your Memo Bank current account doesn't stay still. Deposits finance part of the loans we grant to other clients. Think of it as a small loop, where the euros you trust us with get injected back into the real economy straight away, through business loans.
Where your money goes
Deposits help SMBs
Deposits are the key to financing projects for small and medium businesses (SMBs) like yours. We could have clients' money placed in funds that would have nothing to do with SMBs, but we rather offer loans for our other SMB clients.
Deposits move to ECB
Part of the deposits are placed on an account we own at the European Central Bank (ECB). Just like any bank, the ECB applies an interest rate to deposits. That rate can either be positive or negative. If the rate is negative, banks like Memo Bank have to pay to deposit money at the ECB. If the interest rate is positive, then banks get paid by the ECB.
Deposits are safe
When you deposits money in a bank, the deposits are guaranteed up to 100,000€ in case of a bankruptcy. To offer such protection, banks need to join the FGDR’s guarantee - the Fonds de garantie des dépôts. In addition to being kept in a safe technical environment, your deposits are protected by the same guarantees provided in any banks.
Our principles
We put our clients first
We don't offer loans to individuals nor large companies. We only offer loans to SMBs, and among SMBs, we only finance the ones we're already doing business with. In other words: our clients' deposits help finance our clients, without going through external funds.
We serve innovators
We focus on innovative SMBs that scale. As a real bank, we partner with Bpifrance and the European investment funds, two institutions that help innovative SMB reduce their carbon emissions and engage in their digital transformation.
We don't do margin coal
We don't offer loans to projects linked to the development or exploitation of fossil fuels, like coal, gas, or oil. More precisely, we don't do business with the projects listed on coalexit.org (for coal) and gogel.org (for gas and oil). The complete list of the industries we refuse to do business with is available on our website (in French)
The impact of our loans
99% of our clients are low emitters
According to our data, 99% of the loans we made in 2021 went to companies with a low impact on global warming (they emit less than 200g of CO2e per euro lent). If we focus on the value of our loans, 87% of the euros we lent went to low-emitting projects.
100% of our clients are French
We only offer bank loans to our clients, and since our clients have to be located in France, all our loans go to French companies. What about the French subsidiaries of global corporations? Most of the time, the subsidiaries choose the same bank as the bank already doing business with their headquarter - meaning they mostly rely on big corporate banks - meaning not us.