Selecting the savings account in the Slovak Republic

Abstract

There are currently many investment and financial products that can be used for capitalizing of savings. Although investments in various commodities, shares, securities, or funds can be with high yields, it requires some knowledge and experience. Unattempted investor may experience unpleasant surprise of possible losses of greater amount of money, as such investments are generally associated with a higher risk. For these reasons, the majority of the population remains in the Slovak Republic faithful to traditional forms of capitalizing of funds. One of these forms are savings accounts in banks. The main purpose of this paper is to find possibly the best savings account in the Slovak Republic. In cooperation with experts from the field of banking, the authors have defined the selection criteria of savings accounts, assessed their importance and, then, they have arranged savings accounts offered in the Slovak Republic according to achieved score. For this purpose, methods of multicriteria decision making were used. These methods are based on the evaluation of several alternative solutions based on multiple criteria. These criteria must be assigned by weights which represent their importance in decision making process. These weights were calculated using the Saaty’s method, which is a method based on mutual comparison of all the criteria. For final ranking of term deposits, taking into account the weights of the criteria, the method TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) was used. Keywords: savings, banking products, savings accounts, multicriteria decision making. JEL Classification: E21, G21