See which institutions owe you money, which hold your assets, and where protection may depend on the account, owner or jurisdiction. Add your banks and investment types to build an exposure map, review supported deposit-protection estimates and identify questions for your adviser. This tool does not predict whether a bank will fail. Start with a sample, or enter a scenario without creating an account.
Covered in this version: deposits booked in the United States and Switzerland, single-owner accounts (Swiss joint accounts included), 141 catalogued banks (71 FDIC-insured, 70 Swiss). Everything else is mapped and explained, not calculated. Type the name on your statement; brands are matched to the legal entity. Three positions take about three minutes; we are measuring that during the pilot rather than promising it.
A bank can owe you money, keep your assets for you, and be the issuer of a product you hold, all at the same time. Each role carries a different risk and a different protection. The checker keeps them apart, because the number that matters is different in each case.
| Position | Relationship | What the checker reports |
|---|---|---|
| Current account, $200,000 | The bank owes you money (deposit claim) | Pooled with the savings account below |
| Savings account, $100,000, same bank, same owner | The bank owes you money (deposit claim) | Pool of $300,000; $250,000 within the FDIC single-account limit; $50,000 above it |
| Bond issued by the same bank, $1,000,000, held in custody there | The bank holds it for you and also owes you its value (custody and issuer claim) | Not a deposit, not insured as one; shown as issuer exposure to the same legal entity |
| Total entered | $1,300,000, counted once. Exposure to the bank: $1,300,000. Deposits within a published limit: $250,000. Not determined: nothing in this example. | |
The $50,000 above the limit is not a predicted loss. It is the part of the deposit that the insurance scheme would not pay; it stays a claim against the bank and ranks with other creditors. The bond is a separate matter again: where it is kept protects the paper, not the promise printed on it. Most of the value in this example sits in that promise.
What the checker will not do is turn this into a score. A score would have to guess at the bank's solvency, and nobody can read that off an account list. What can be read off an account list is the shape of the exposure, and that is where most of the avoidable mistakes live: two brands that are one legal entity, two banks that share a name but not a balance sheet, cash that is really a money-market fund, a "guaranteed" note whose guarantor is the bank that sold it.
A balance on a current, savings or term account is money the bank owes you. If the bank fails, you are a creditor. Deposit-protection schemes exist for exactly this case: in the United States the FDIC insures up to $250,000 per depositor, per insured bank, per ownership category; in Switzerland deposits are privileged up to CHF 100,000 per client and bank, with esisuisse funding the payout. Both limits apply to the legal entity, so two brands of one bank share one limit and two banks in one group each have their own. Our guide to Swiss private banking goes into the Swiss side in more detail.
Shares, bonds and fund units that a bank keeps for you are not a debt of the bank. In Switzerland the law segregates custody assets from a bankrupt bank's estate and returns them to the client; in the United States they are customer property, with SIPC rules for broker-dealers. So the insurance limit is the wrong yardstick for a securities account. The right questions are whether the asset is really held in custody rather than as a claim against the bank, and who issued it. The checker asks both and refuses to classify a securities account as "unprotected" just because it is larger than a deposit limit.
Cash and investments inside a life policy, including PPLI, belong to the arrangement the policy creates. Your rights run against the insurer, under the policy's law, often with a custodian holding the underlying assets in a segregated account. Deposit insurance does not reach into a policy, and the policyholder-protection rules that do apply differ by country and by contract. This version identifies the insurer and lists what to confirm; it does not estimate a protected amount. The articles on PPLI risk management and evaluating a carrier cover what those confirmations usually involve.
The engine is a small, deterministic program: the same entries against the same catalogue and rule versions always produce the same result. It runs in your browser. The methodology page carries the data model, the rule packs and the review record.
1 classify each position: deposit, cash at broker, security, fund unit, policy, unknown
2 identify the legal entity from the catalogue; a brand is not a key
3 relate DEPOSIT_CLAIM, ISSUER_CLAIM, CUSTODY, POLICY_CLAIM, GROUP_LINK
4 test only a published rule pack, in force, within its stated coverage
missing field -> undetermined; structure outside coverage -> unsupported
5 pool deposits by the rule's own unit: one owner, one legal bank, one category
6 present protection, ownership, credit exposure and access delay, kept apart
7 evidence every finding carries rule_id, sources, effective date and the inputs used
The institution catalogue holds 71 FDIC-insured banks, every one of the largest US banks by assets, whose legal names and certificate numbers were read from the FDIC's institution register, and 70 Swiss banks authorised by FINMA, including the cantonal banks and the Swiss subsidiaries of the large international groups, with the legal names as published. Each entry carries the brand names that appear on statements, so typing "Chase" or "Credit Suisse" lands on the legal entity that actually books the account, with a note on why. Swiss commercial-register numbers are not loaded yet; the catalogue says so instead of inventing them. Rule packs draw on the FDIC's deposit-insurance guidance, FINMA's depositor-protection page, esisuisse's description of the 2023 changes and the Swiss Banking Act. Each pack carries the date it was last checked and the date its rule came into force, which are not the same date.
Four measures that are never added together; a reading of the result in plain sentences, written from the engine output rather than from a template; the exposure map and its table; concentration by entity, as a share of what you entered in each currency; the deposit pools with their rule and evidence, including what the sources say about how and when a scheme pays; a what-if panel that moves a deposit to another catalogued bank on a copy of your scenario and shows the four measures before and after; the open items; and the questions for your adviser, written from your own positions.
Trust, company and US joint accounts; brokers' cash sweeps; deposits in a currency other than the rule's own; banks outside the catalogue; countries other than the United States and Switzerland; look-through into funds; and any policy calculation. In each case the position is still mapped, the reason is stated in plain words, and the item goes on the list of questions for your adviser. An unsupported structure never produces a figure that looks like a single-owner estimate.
Your entries are processed in this browser and are not sent to PPLI.com in this version. The tool writes nothing to local storage, session storage, cookies or any database; closing the tab removes the working state, and the Clear session button does the same while the page is open. The downloadable summary is built in the browser and saved by the browser. We cannot promise forensic deletion from a device's memory, and we do not try to. Website analytics, the inquiry form and the research assistant have their own data flows, described in the Privacy Policy; none of them receives your scenario.
The checker asks five things per position. All five are on an ordinary statement, usually in the places below. If one is missing, enter what you have; the result will say exactly which rule could not be tested and why.
| Field | Where to look | What catches people out |
|---|---|---|
| Legal entity | The footer of the statement, the account terms, or the regulatory line under the logo. It is rarely the name on the front page. | Private-banking labels, online brands and sweep programs are not banks. "Chase Private Client" is JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A.; a Merrill cash sweep is a deposit at Bank of America, N.A.; a Credit Suisse statement may now be a UBS Switzerland AG account. |
| Booking country | The branch address on the statement, or the "booking centre" line that private banks print. | A US bank's branch in another country is not covered by the FDIC rules, and a deposit at a Swiss bank's foreign branch is counted as a separate client under the 2023 esisuisse rules: privileged in a bankruptcy, but not covered by the insurance. |
| What it is | The section heading: "cash and deposits", "money market", "securities", "fund holdings". For a policy, the contract schedule. | "Cash" at a broker is often a money-market fund or a sweep to several banks, each with its own treatment. The statement names the vehicle in small print. |
| Who owns it | The account title: one name, two names, a trust name, a company name. | A joint title and a single title at the same bank are different ownership categories; a trust with named beneficiaries has its own rules that this version does not calculate. |
| Issuer (securities only) | The holdings list: issuer name next to the ISIN or CUSIP, or the term sheet of a structured note. | A note "guaranteed" by the bank that sold it is the bank's own promise. Where the note is kept protects the paper, not the promise. |
Each rule pack cites the source it was written from, with the date we read it. Catalogue entries carry the register they were checked against. If a source changes, the dependent findings are suspended rather than quietly updated; the current versions are shown under every result and on the methodology page.
FDIC, Deposit Insurance At A Glance and Understanding Deposit Insurance: the $250,000 standard maximum, the ownership categories and the rule that securities, mutual funds and annuities are not deposits. Institution identities and certificate numbers were read from the FDIC institution register on 1 November 2026, and the payout mechanics shown beside each finding come from the FDIC's own page on payment to depositors: a stated goal of paying insured deposits within two business days, and a Receiver's Certificate for the part above the limit. For ownership categories this version does not calculate, the FDIC's own EDIE estimator is the authoritative tool.
FINMA, Depositor protection: the CHF 100,000 privileged amount per client, the second creditor class and the segregation of custody assets. esisuisse, Changes as of 2023: joint-account groups treated as one client, foreign branches counted separately, prefunding of half the payment obligation, the seven-working-day transfer to the liquidator. The underlying provisions are Articles 37a, 37b, 37d and 37h of the Banking Act. Bank identities were taken from FINMA's list of authorised institutions.
SIPC, What SIPC protects: a different kind of protection from deposit insurance, with no cover against market loss. This version describes it and does not calculate it; a separate rule pack is planned once it has its own test cases and reviewer.
Published by PPLI.com on 1 November 2026 as a pilot. Prepared by the PPLI.com research desk under Eldar Edmond Grady, Chief Executive Officer, who is responsible for the content; the engine's fixtures (deposit pooling, brand versus entity, group links, custody, issuer concentration, duplicates, currency and determinism) were run before publication and are described on the methodology page. The two rule packs are published for the pilot; the name of the banking-law reviewer for each country will be recorded on the methodology page when that review is complete, and the pilot label stays until it is. Commercial disclosure: PPLI.com introduces families and advisers to private placement life insurance providers; the checker does not recommend any bank, insurer or product, and no result on this page leads to a product. To report an error in a catalogue entry, a rule or a source, write to [email protected] with the page link and the rule or entity id. See the editorial standards.
Send the page link and the rule or entity id you want to discuss. Leave the amounts out; we do not need them, and the tool never sends them. An inquiry is a research question, not a professional engagement, and we cannot commit to a response time.
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