Cashier withdrawal fee. Account maintenance fee. Transfer fee. Fee per card. Overdraft fee. For several years, bank commissions became the main source of income for banks that, with interest rates at times in the negative, did not have many other ways to find profitability. They also became the main source of complaint from customers, annoyed at paying every step for concepts that are difficult to justify. However, with rising interest rates, the model is beginning to change and, although fees will not stop hovering in banking activity, they may become, according to experts, a weapon to compete or discriminate against customers.
After more than a year of progressive interest rate hikes by the European Central Bank (ECB), banks already earn 3.4 times more from interest than from commissions. According to the results presented, during the first half of the year they obtained 40,292 million for interest margins, which is the difference between the money they receive for loans granted and what they pay for deposits. The figure is 23% higher than that of the first semester of last year and 42% higher than that of the same period in 2021.
This strong take-off contrasts with what has happened with commissions. They continue to grow, but less than interest margins: 2.8% in 2022 and 17% in 2021. Experts say that, if only commission data is taken in the second quarter of the year, a first setback compared to the first can already be seen, but caused by a decrease in the number of operations and not because the banks have lowered them.
“We had zero interest rates for years and the banks had to survive on commissions. When the excess liquidity ends, my impression is that they will possibly start to be more competitive for commissions and take commercial actions”, says Antonio Castelo, of iBroker, as long as delinquencies remain under control.
“We already see a decline in the banks’ income from commissions in their activity in Spain”, says Alberto Valle, director of the firm Accuracy. “The trend is for them to continue to decline, although for now more due to volume than due to a change in commercial policy.” Next year, he says, if interest margins continue to rise, banks could start to compete in commissions.
Antonio Gallardo, head of studies at the association of financial clients Asufin, believes that banks should start cutting fees, especially when “they have kept them high for years with the argument that interest rates were very low”. The danger, he says, is now that there are entities that want to take advantage to “get rid of the bad customers and get the good ones”. There could be “discrimination through the commissions”.
Among the large Spanish banks there are two, CaixaBank and Sabadell, which during the first half of the year received less money for commissions than during the same period of the previous year. The first obtained 1,846 million euros in this way, compared to 1,994 million a year earlier, while the second entered 697 million, compared to 729 million in the first half of 2022. Santander and BBVA raised the item of commissions, especially for international business.
