Little by little, one hears from more and more banks and savings banks that they are repaying money to their customers as a result of the BGH ruling on account management fees from April.

A customer of Frankfurter Sparkasse has now received a letter in which he is offered a flat-rate refund of 25 euros.

This payment is not connected with the recognition of a legal obligation, it says in the letter.

The FAZ has the relevant documents.

Christian Siedenbiedel

Editor in business.

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The reason for the comparatively low amount is that the BGH ruling only refers to fee increases from the past, so the reimbursement of all fees paid is out of the question.

If the customer accepts the money, the Sparkasse will consider all possible existing or future claims as settled.

In the judgment, the BGH had declared the past practice of banks to be inadmissible, with the help of certain clauses to simply notify customers of changes to the general terms and conditions, such as fee increases, and to regard silence as consent.

The amount of the amounts that bank and savings bank customers of various institutes are currently being offered as repayments are apparently very different depending on the institute, but in some cases also on the customer.

Lawyers report an average of 111 euros.

In one case, a savings bank had already offered 300 euros if the matter could then be regarded as settled.

Even if the amounts per customer are rather small, the total for the banks is hundreds of millions of euros.

Stiftung Warentest has developed sample letters with which bank customers can assert their claims.

Lawyers had also asked their mandates to contact the banking supervisory authority BaFin, so that the banks and savings banks could put more emphasis on the enforcement of the BGH ruling.

Appropriate sample letters were made available to the mandates.

BaFin wants to ensure that the ruling is implemented

A spokeswoman for BaFin said on request, however, that the supervisory authority is currently not planning a so-called general order on this matter.

"It is first and foremost up to the banks themselves to implement the BGH decision and to take care of their terms and conditions change mechanisms promptly," said the BaFin spokeswoman.

You can see that the institutes reacted with different approaches.

"Of course we keep a watchful eye on it," said the BaFin spokeswoman: "Whether there is a need for supervisory action in individual cases or in general cannot currently be foreseen."

Lawyers also mention the names of institutes that would have paid under certain circumstances.

These banks included cooperative banks such as Bremische Volksbank, VR-Bank Bonn and Westerwald Bank, but also Volkswagen Bank, Netbank and Sparda-Bank Augsburg, reports the law firm Gansel Rechtsanwälte in Berlin.

She also mentions Debeka Bausparkasse.

Associations: decision of each individual bank

The industry association of the German credit industry has agreed on a common language regulation on how to deal with the topic. It says: “The associations in the German banking industry inform their member institutes about developments in the relevant (supreme court) jurisprudence. In this case, too, the respective associations informed their respective members about the BGH judgment and the resulting legal consequences. Which specific measures the individual institute derives from the judgment is up to the individual assessment and decision of the respective house. "

The question of any reimbursement claims depends on the respective course of the contractual relationship between the institute and the customer. “Changes to the contract in the current business relationship can be accepted by customers in various ways or incorporated into the contractual relationship. When customers contact the institutes with claims for repayment, they are therefore always included in a case-by-case assessment and decided individually, ”says Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft.