Lodavo vs Desjardins: Keep Your Caisse, Add a Weekly Draw

The caisse has been there since you were a kid. Your mortgage is there, there’s a member dividend most years, and you get a vote on how the surplus is split. Nothing about comparing Lodavo and Desjardins asks you to give any of that up. Desjardins is Canada’s largest cooperative financial group. It holds your money, pays a rate on it, and sells you everything else in one place. Lodavo is a free app that gives you a chance to win cash every week for saving, and it works with the Desjardins account you already use.

What is the difference between Lodavo and Desjardins?

Desjardins holds your money and pays interest on it. Lodavo does neither. It connects to the Desjardins account you already have and gives you free tickets in a weekly cash draw based on what you save. You keep banking at your caisse exactly as you do now, and the balance already sitting there starts earning you a chance at cash alongside the interest the account pays.

Desjardins is a cooperative rather than a bank, and that shows up in a few places. You’re a member, not a customer. Your deposits sit at a caisse regulated under Quebec law, so the Autorité des marchés financiers (opens in a new tab) insures them to $100,000 per category instead of CDIC. Part of the surplus comes back to members as a dividend, and in Quebec the members vote on it. Everything else Desjardins sells hangs off that membership: chequing, savings, credit, insurance, investments, an advisor.

Lodavo attaches to one of those accounts instead of replacing it. As Canada’s first prize-linked savings app, it never holds your money. You connect the Canadian account you already save in, and each week that balance earns you free tickets in a draw for up to $10,000, with at least $100 going to a user every week. There’s nothing to open and nothing to fund.

How Desjardins works

Desjardins prices its everyday accounts by how much you transact and lets you cancel the fee by holding a balance. Savings is where the rate gets less exciting.

What a caisse account costs, and how the fee disappears

Chequing comes in four plans: $3.95 a month for Basic with 12 transactions, $10.95 for Intermediate with 30, $15.95 for Unlimited and $23.95 for Unlimited Plus (opens in a new tab) (as of 2026). Unlike most big-bank line-ups, every tier waives the fee completely if you keep a minimum balance all month: $1,500, $3,000, $4,000 and $5,000 respectively. Savings accounts have no monthly fee at all.

Two groups do better than that. Members aged 18 to 30 get the Unlimited plan free, and so do newcomers to Canada for their first two years. That’s genuinely generous pricing, and it’s worth knowing before you go shopping for a no-fee account somewhere else.

What Desjardins savings actually pays

The non-registered savings account and the RRSP savings account both post 0.55 percent, the TFSA savings account 0.35 percent and the FHSA savings account 2.00 percent (opens in a new tab) (as of 2026). Chequing pays nothing. For context, the Bank of Canada (opens in a new tab) has held its policy rate at 2.25 percent since October 2025, so 0.55 percent sits well under it, and the online banks pay several times that on cash you can move tomorrow.

The FHSA account is the outlier, and if you’re saving for a first home it’s a real rate rather than a token one. Term savings pays more again, though you have to lock the money up for a fixed period.

Desjardins pays members a share of the surplus

Desjardins is a cooperative, so what it earns above its costs goes back to members rather than to shareholders. It pays that out as a member dividend, and each caisse’s members vote at the annual general meeting on whether it’s paid and how it’s split (opens in a new tab). There’s a product dividend of up to $75 for holding something from each of four product lines (three, if you’re 30 or under) and a volume dividend based on the balances, card spending, investment fees and premiums you hold there. Someone with a mortgage, investments and insurance at the caisse gets a very different number from someone with a chequing account. Look up what yours actually paid last year before you write it off.

Desjardins does run draws, just not on your balance

Over November and December 2025 the Fédération des caisses Desjardins ran a contest, Curious to know more about FHSAs? (opens in a new tab), that entered anyone who contributed to a Desjardins FHSA during those two months. There were eight $2,500 cash prizes, drawn on January 15, 2026.

It was a marketing promotion rather than a standing feature. It ran for two months, gave you one entry however much you contributed, and drew once. Nothing like it is running today. Lodavo’s draw runs every week, and what you already have saved is what earns the tickets.

A free draw on top of your caisse account

Lodavo is free and setup takes about two minutes. You connect a Desjardins chequing account, a savings account, or a deposit-based TFSA through Plaid (opens in a new tab), signing in on Plaid’s own screen with the AccèsD credentials you always use. Plaid covers roughly 99 percent of Canadian deposit accounts, and the access it grants is read-only. Your tickets follow what you save, so the bigger the balance on Sunday, the more of them you get.

The draw runs weekly for up to $10,000, with a guaranteed prize of at least $100 going to a user. You can check the result yourself: the provably fair page shows how each week’s numbers are generated and verified, and the contest rules cover who can enter and what the odds are. One Desjardins-specific note: Desjardins Online Brokerage (Disnat) and other investment accounts can’t be tracked yet, so pick an account where the money sits as cash. Our Desjardins connection page walks through the whole thing.

Can you use both together?

Yes, and for a Desjardins member that’s usually the entire answer. Nothing has to close, nothing has to move, and no product gets given up. Keep the caisse, the plan, the waiver balance, the dividend and your advisor, then connect that same savings balance so it also earns you tickets every week. Your AccèsD login, your AMF coverage and your rate are all untouched.

So Lodavo vs Desjardins isn’t really a choice. The caisse pays the interest and insures the deposit. Lodavo gives you a chance at cash for saving, and adding it costs nothing.

When Desjardins is the better choice

Stay with the caisse alone if what you want is any of this:

• A branch you can walk into and an advisor who knows your file, in most towns in Quebec and eastern Ontario.
• Chequing, savings, credit, a mortgage, insurance and investments in one relationship.
• Insured deposits with a guaranteed return, which is what a savings account is for.
• The member dividend and a vote on how the surplus is split, neither of which you get as a bank customer.
• Free unlimited chequing because you’re 18 to 30, or new to Canada.
• A first-home fund, where the FHSA savings account’s 2.00 percent beats most everyday savings rates.

If the 0.55 percent is what’s bothering you, that’s a different question, and Desjardins alternatives in Canada lines up the accounts paying more.

Where a weekly draw fits for a Quebec saver

Add Lodavo if:

• You want a chance to win cash every week just for saving.
• You’d rather not open an account or move a dollar to be in a draw.
• You want it free, in French, with nothing else to keep track of.
• You have no intention of leaving your caisse.
• You want a reason to add to the savings account that 0.55 percent doesn’t give you.

The draw is fully open to Quebec residents, which is worth checking when you live there. Plenty of Canadian contests still leave the province out rather than deal with rules that were repealed in 2023, and most Desjardins members live in Quebec. Lodavo is built in Montreal and runs in both languages, so it never had a reason to leave Quebec out.

And you’re not giving anything up to be in the draw. The 0.55 percent keeps arriving, the FHSA keeps paying 2.00 percent, the dividend is calculated the same way it always was, and the tickets are free on top of all of it.

The more you save, the more tickets you get, and the weekly draw pays up to $10,000. Get Lodavo free on the Apple App Store (opens in a new tab) or Google Play Store (opens in a new tab).

Terms and conditions apply. No purchase necessary (alternate method of entry available). Skill-testing question required. Open to legal residents of Canada who are the age of majority. Odds depend on the number of eligible entries received. Full rules and odds at our contest rules.