With hardly any commercial efforts or significant increases in remuneration, banks are managing to attract deposits from individuals at the fastest speed in six years. According to experts, they do so without needing to launch a war over liabilities, limiting themselves to offering small increases that do not exceed those of other investment products, but are sufficient to attract the most conservative savers.
According to the latest data from the Bank of Spain, banks subscribed one-year deposits in November for 14,654 million euros. It is the highest figure so far this year and more than triples that recorded in the same month of 2022, 4,639 million. Since the end of 2017, they had not raised so much money in a single month.
What both banks and consumer associations agree on is that these movements are not due so much to the offers of entities, which still have sufficient liquidity, but to consumer demand. The forecast is that interest rates will not rise beyond the current 4.5% and will even tend to fall, so that the remuneration of deposits already has little room to rise.
“The cause is more in a change in consumer habits than in an increase in profitability,” explains Antonio Gallardo, head of Studies at the association of financial users Asufin. “Individual spending had been increasing between the post-pandemic and the first half of last year. Now it is not that there is fear, but his profile has become more conservative in the face of the economic situation,” he points out.
In November, the average remuneration on deposits stood at 2.62%, compared to 2.46% the previous month. It started the year at 0.46% and its increase has not only been slow, but has made Spanish banks the most lagging in the euro zone by rewarding savings, despite the messages of the vice president of the European Central Bank himself. (ECB), Luis de Guindos, reminding them that “rate increases are for everyone.” In January of last year, the Euribor, which is the reference rate for mortgages, was 3.3%.
Banking sources recognize that entities are far from starting a war over liabilities and assure that the gap in lower profitability with respect to the rest of the euro zone is narrowing. What is happening now, they indicate, is a “strong transfer from demand accounts to time deposits.” “Individuals have come to have 90% of the money in checking accounts instead of investing it, and that was not normal,” they indicate.
Between January and November, banks have subscribed deposits amounting to 117,420 million euros and the forecast is that they will close 2023 with close to 130,000 million euros, which will have far exceeded the 44,976 million for the whole of 2022, when the Interest rates began to rise without hardly any improvement in the remuneration of savers. The figure for the year just concluded will likely be the highest since 2016.
