Nini money, which is neither dedicated to repaying loans nor invested in deposits, Treasury bills or pension plans. This is how a good part of the almost 900,000 million euros that households have in bank current accounts could be classified, offering hardly any returns and sometimes generating costs in maintenance fees. This particular way of keeping money under the bank mattress makes the Spaniards an anomaly within the euro zone.
According to the latest data from the European Central Bank (ECB), Spanish households had 866,000 million euros in current accounts in November last year, ahead of the 847,000 million of Italians and 589,000 of the French. They were only surpassed by the rich neighbors to the north, the Germans, with 1.73 billion euros.
This order of appearance does not conform to what could be expected from the purchasing power of each country. If the data are crossed with the population data from Eurostat, each German would have an average of 20,794 euros in the current account, compared to 18,354 euros for the Spanish, 14,355 euros for the Italians and 8,674 euros for the French.
After several years of ultra-low interest rates, the money of Spanish households is still sheltered in current accounts. The increases in interest rates have caused movement towards term deposits, but less than that of other countries. That is where the differences operate in the opposite direction: Germans have 321,000 million saved in deposits of up to two years, 2.8 times more than the 114,000 million of Spaniards.
Antonio Castelo, iBroker analyst, alludes to the “low profitability” of deposits in Spain as one of the causes of this phenomenon. According to data from the Bank of Spain, they yield an average of 2.57% annually, compared to 3.33% in the euro zone or the 3.8% achieved in France or Italy. Added to this are other factors: “the financial culture fails” and there is “fear of making mistakes when investing.”
The CEO of the consulting firm Inmark, Manuel López, adds other reasons. Spanish banks, he says, “do not have a specific product in which it is easy to go from a demand deposit to another term deposit.” Furthermore, “seeing the amounts obtained with deposits, many clients prefer to have the money whenever they want.” Added to this is that the product that banks have been promoting the most are investment funds, which often generate “distrust” in the consumer.
Another factor that enhances current accounts are the banks’ campaigns to encourage payroll accounts. “Banking seeks customer loyalty, and the payroll account is a good way to achieve this,” indicates the CEO of Inmark.
The head of studies at the financial consumer association Asufin, Antonio Gallardo, regrets that “in large entities deposit offers have almost not existed.” Clients, he assures, “are staying in checking accounts because they do not see profitable options in which to move money.”
Without any outbreak of war over liabilities, Spanish households have moved some 55 billion euros into time deposits and another 22 billion into Treasury bills between January and November 2023. They also dedicated some 13,000 million to amortize mortgages. They put money to work, but much less than in the rest of the euro zone.
At the beginning of the last decade, in 2010, households had more money in time deposits than in checking accounts, a trend that was reversed in 2015, when the latter began to be the majority. Now, and despite the rate increases, NEET money is still equivalent to 88% of what is in the bank, compared to 12% of deposits.
