A Blueprint for Ireland's Savings and Investment Accounts (SIAs)

A Blueprint for Ireland's SIAs

How to unlock €172 billion without building another scheme for the wealthy

The moment has arrived for Ireland to decide what kind of investor nation it wants to be.

Around €172 billion is held in Irish household deposit accounts, much of it in low-yield savings and current accounts. It has been pointed out that the median Irish household has around €9,000 in savings, while BPFI research found that more than one-third of Irish adults with savings or deposit accounts have less than €5,000 in them. Irish households hold just 2.3% of their financial assets in direct investments, such as listed shares and debt securities, compared with an EU average of 7.5%.

That is the gap. Ireland has the savings. It does not have an investment culture. Policy is the lever.

Tánaiste Simon Harris is right to push for a Savings and Investment Account. The economists' warning him to slow down is also right. Both can be true. Ireland has one shot at this, and a rushed SIA that calcifies around deemed disposal, favours the wealthy, and excludes the squeezed middle would be worse than no SIA at all.

This is the blueprint.

How we got here

The pieces have been moving for over a year. Ireland is already moving towards Auto-Enrolment Pensions. The European Commission adopted its Recommendation on increasing the availability of Savings and Investment Accounts in September 2025, as part of the Savings and Investment Union framework. Brussels is now explicitly encouraging Member States to establish or improve accessible Savings and Investment Accounts.

Harris floated the idea publicly in February, name-checking Sweden's ISK, the UK's ISA, and Canada's TFSA as live examples. To understand what is on the table, it helps to see the reference models side by side.

The Banking and Payments Federation of Ireland came out the same week, with chief executive Brian Hayes calling for a domestic SIA that would give Irish households "a simple, internationally competitive way to build assets over time while ensuring more domestic capital is available for Irish businesses and the wider European economy."

In March, Harris convened the first Annual Savings and Investment Forum at the Central Bank, bringing together a group of 300 financial experts. He signalled an ISK-style structure, with a tax-free threshold and a low flat-rate tax on account values above that threshold. He acknowledged that deemed disposal is "posing a real challenge for Irish investors" and that the policy rationale for it is now, in his own words, "questionable at best." The Government is expected to bring forward more detailed proposals ahead of Budget 2027, with a 2027 launch being targeted.

Then, on 6 May, Trinity College Dublin's Barra Roantree and University College Dublin's Enda Hargaden told the Oireachtas finance committee to consider delaying the scheme. Their objections were sharp. Hargaden warned that the policy could be regressive in aggregate because lower-income households may not have enough spare cash to benefit meaningfully. Roantree warned that "history is ripe with examples of where rushed tax legislation leads to bad consequences." They warned that, depending on the design, the cost to the State could be significant over the coming decades.

Harris pushed back the next day, signalling caps to prevent the "uber wealthy" from exploiting the scheme. The debate is now framed as a binary: launch fast versus launch slow, build something versus build it right.

That framing is wrong. And the bigger problem is that the entire debate is about the wrong product.

Stop building a tax wrapper. Start building a participation engine.

The current debate assumes the SIA is fundamentally a tax product. Trim the tax. Cap the relief. Worry about the wealthy gaming it. That framing is the trap.

A tax wrapper rewards the people who already have capital to shelter. A participation engine rewards the people who start investing for the first time. Those are not the same product, and Ireland keeps designing the first when it needs the second.

Three problems make this concrete.

The wrapper is downstream of the tax code. Deemed disposal is the disease. The SIA is a treatment for the symptom. You cannot bolt a tax-free wrapper onto an underlying regime where ETFs and Irish-domiciled funds are taxed at 38% every eight years on unrealised gains, with no loss relief across investment types, and call it reform. Budget 2026 trimmed the rate from 41% to 38%. The fund industry called it a cosmetic change and they were right.

Tax breaks do not create investment cultures. Distribution does. According to the Swedish Investment Fund Association, Sweden has one of the EU's lowest household deposit shares at around 19% of household financial assets, compared with an EU average of around 42%. Germany sits at 44%. Ireland sits near the top of that ladder. Sweden did not get there with the ISK alone. It built participation through its Premium Pension system, funds, defaults, and decades of policy. The ISK did not create that culture from nothing.

The participation gap is a trust gap. Roantree is right that the €172bn figure can be misread when you look at the median. He has noted that the headline number works out to roughly €90,000 per household, which does not stack up against other statistics. The reality is more uneven, with one in three Irish adults holding savings under €5,000. These are not non-investors because of tax friction. They are non-investors because nobody they trust has ever offered them a credible, low-friction path into the market. Evidence from Sweden suggests that ISK uptake is also higher among more educated groups, even when income is controlled for.

The mistake would be to design the SIA around the person who already knows how to invest. That person will use the scheme anyway. The real policy test is whether the account works for the person with €500 in savings, no financial adviser, no investment platform account, and no confidence that the system was built for them. Pass that test, and the scheme works for everyone. Fail it, and the critics are right.

What the critics get right

Hargaden and Roantree have done the Government a favour. Their critique deserves to be steelmanned, not dismissed.

A poorly capped, tax-only SIA will be regressive. If the wealthy can shelter unlimited capital at zero tax, they will. Ireland already foregoes significant revenue through tax expenditures, with the Department of Finance's annual cost estimated at around €8 billion, and the Commission on Taxation and Welfare has been clear that the State should be plugging those holes, not opening new ones. Niamh Moloney at the London School of Economics has made the related point that tax incentives without literacy can reinforce inequality rather than reduce it.

A tax break rewards capacity. A match builds participation. The blueprint below is built around that distinction.

The blueprint: six principles for an Irish SIA that works

This is my proposal. The Government has signalled direction. None of the design choices below are yet on the table. They should be.

1. Fix deemed disposal inside the SIA from day one. No deemed disposal inside the wrapper. Full stop. Provider-level tax reporting from day one, so investors are not asked to calculate notional gains on unrealised positions. A published roadmap for deemed disposal reform outside the wrapper within 12 months, alongside Budget 2027. Harris has already signalled that the rule is hindering investment. Acting on that statement is the test of whether this is genuine reform or political theatre. The SIA cannot be a simple account wrapped around a complex tax code.

2. Match contributions for lower and middle-income households. This is the centrepiece. Every adult resident can open a Starter SIA, but the State match is targeted by income. A higher match rate for lower-income households on the first €1,000 to €2,000 contributed annually, tapering to zero for high earners. A first-time investor bonus available once. A capped tax-free threshold above the matched layer — for example a €30,000 lifetime contribution cap with annual contributions capped between €5,000 and €7,500. A low annual flat-rate tax on account values above the cap, broadly similar to the Swedish ISK approach. The cap is the fairness mechanism. The match is the participation mechanism. Together, they directly answer Hargaden's regressivity critique.

3. Auto-open the account, but do not auto-invest people. Every eligible adult is given an SIA opened automatically through Revenue, MyGovID, payroll, or the Auto-Enrolment Pensions onboarding. They are nudged to fund it. They complete a short plain-English learning journey before investing, including an emergency savings checkpoint that asks whether they hold short-term reserves, whether they understand investments can fall, and whether they are carrying high-interest debt. If they choose to invest, the default is a diversified low-cost portfolio. They can ignore, opt out, or transfer at any time. Defaults are powerful, but auto-opening the door is responsible. Auto-pushing people through it is not. Ireland should open the door, not push.

4. Distribute through credit unions, An Post, and the institutions households trust. If the SIA is distributed mainly through brokers, fund platforms, and pillar banks, the participation curve will skew affluent. Credit unions affiliated to the ILCU have 3.6 million members across the island of Ireland and have topped the Ireland Reputation Index for three consecutive years. An Post has a physical presence in communities that purely digital investment platforms may struggle to reach. Payroll, employers, regulated fintechs with strong UX, and adult education channels should all be in the mix. If the SIA is distributed through wealth channels, it will produce wealth-channel outcomes.

5. Build a national default fund, with a progressive Junior SIA attached. A first-time investor does not need a marketplace of 400 funds. They need one default option that is globally diversified, low-cost, plain-English, risk-rated, portable across providers, and protected by strong governance. Choice should be available for those who want it. The default should be boring by design. The default fund should be designed for the person who does not know what an ETF is, not the person debating which ETF is most tax-efficient. Attached to this should be a Junior SIA, opened at birth, with a State seed contribution plus matching for lower-income households, a smaller match for middle-income households, and family contributions allowed without a match for higher-income households. Same account structure for every child. Same default for every child. The eligible asset list, per the EU Recommendation, should be UCITS funds, ETFs, Irish and EU government bonds, and a curated allocation to Irish and EU productive assets. No complex derivatives. No leverage. No speculative crypto exposure.

6. Measure providers on participation, not assets under management. What the State measures is what the market will optimise for. If providers are measured on total assets, they will chase wealthy customers. If they are measured on first-time investors, default fund performance, fees, retention, and participation by income band, they will build for inclusion. Approved providers should be required to report annually on the number of first-time investors onboarded, median account balance, participation rates by income decile, fees, default fund performance, transfer times, complaints, and financial literacy completion rates. Publish the league table. Let the market compete on outcomes.

Here is the blueprint in one view, mapped against the criticisms it answers.

What this means for builders

For builders, the SIA is the most consequential fintech distribution event in Ireland in two decades. Whoever builds the rails for opening, funding, allocating, reporting on, and educating around SIA holdings will define Irish retail investing for a generation. Auto-opening plus a national default plus credit union and An Post distribution is a once-in-a-career inclusion moment, and it will not stay open forever.

The opportunity is bigger than the wrapper itself. It is the trust layer that sits on top of it. Credit unions are an under-appreciated channel here, with the reach, the regulatory standing, and the community trust that the new product needs to land outside the affluent professional class. The builders who recognise this and architect for it now will have a generational advantage over those still waiting for the legislation to be published.

This is also highly relevant to the work we are doing at NestiFi, where we see credit unions and community banks as a critical distribution layer for family-focused financial products.

The decision in front of Ireland

Harris does not have to choose between launching fast and launching right. Hargaden and Roantree have handed him political cover to do this properly. Use it.

The SIA can be the cornerstone of an Irish investment culture. Or it can be another scheme that quietly benefits the people who already have advisors. Six principles. One blueprint. Fix deemed disposal inside the wrapper. Match contributions for the people who need help starting. Auto-open the door, but do not auto-push people through it. Distribute through the institutions people actually trust. Build a boring default fund and a progressive Junior SIA. Measure providers on participation, not assets.

Do those six things, and Ireland does not need to copy Sweden, the UK, or Canada. Ireland builds the participation engine that those countries wish they had built first.

€172 billion is sitting in deposit accounts. Two-thirds of households will never engage with the current proposal. The moment has arrived.

Let's build the SIA Ireland actually needs.

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