2023-06-23 12:54:47
Discomfort in the National Market and Competition Commission (CNMC) at the reluctance of banks to transfer the rise in interest rates to the remuneration of their clients’ savings.
The president of the organization, Cani Fernández, assures that “we are monitoring” the market, in the face of a possible situation of tacit collusion. That is to say, that the entities have coordinated indirectly, through their own behavior in the market.
The sector has defended for months that the low remuneration is due to the current excess liquidity in the market. In other words, they no longer need to raise as many funds to give credit.
But from Competition they are firm: “It is very difficult for me to think that there is not a bank that wants to win customers or increase its market share, unless one is placidly seeing that the others either”, criticized the president of the organization during her participation in the APIE and BBVA Summer Courses at the Menéndez Pelayo International University.
The Bank of Spain itself has verified that the current cycle of interest rate rises is not being transferred to deposits, although it indicates that the entities that offer the lowest remuneration are also the ones that have applied the least impact to their loans, especially in the mortgage segment. In the same forum, Governor Pablo Hernández de Cos confirmed that “the increase in the Euribor has only been partially transferred to the average cost of deposits, below what was observed in other cycles of tightening of monetary policy.”
The governor also ensures that this low remuneration is contributing to the fact that monetary policy is not fully transferred to the real economy. “When you increase the incentive to save, savings are higher and consumption is reduced,” he said, explaining that this would help bring inflation down to the 2% target.
At the center of the debate
In recent weeks, the Government has also increased pressure on the financial sector to improve the treatment of its clients in this regard. The Minister of Economy, Nadia Calviño, has even gone so far as to propose that this matter be discussed at the meeting that she will hold with the entities on June 29, initially intended to analyze the impact of the code of good practices to help affected mortgagees due to the rise in the Euribor. So the meeting will be tense. At the moment, the Bank of Spain has not entered into an assessment of whether this pressure from the Executive may entail a certain reputational risk for the entities, but the discomfort in the sector is palpable.
On the other hand, the CNMC wanted to make it clear that, due to a lack of tools, the agency cannot detect and prove that the banks have agreed on their current pricing policies, although they insist that “this does not mean that we are not investigating it.” ».
Faced with this scenario, they have asked the political parties to include in their programs new mechanisms that allow the institution to undertake these market investigations more effectively, as is already the case in other neighboring countries such as the United Kingdom, in order to force companies to to comply with the recommendations once this type of practice is detected. .
The CNMV, vigilant
Banks have been transferring their clients from deposits to other types of products such as investment funds that, among other things, generate higher commission income for the entity. From the sector they defend that it is an alternative to offer profitability in the medium term. But the truth is that deposits are no longer an option.
At the moment, this transfer of conservative savings to funds does not worry the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV), as explained by the president of the supervisor, Rodrigo Buenaventura, in the same forum. What’s more, from the point of view of financial education, they consider it positive that families go beyond deposits when looking for returns in the medium-long term.
But beware. Because the funds do not guarantee investments. In fact, the supervisor himself recently approved a guide to force entities to include customer warnings before they contract products such as target return funds or those with ‘buy and hold’ strategies, which in recent times have been protagonists of the commercialization activity of the entities.
In this type of product, if the investor wants to exit before expiration and interest rates continue to rise, losses are virtually guaranteed. So the guide forces you to warn about this possibility before hiring.
The CNMV remains vigilant in this regard, but Buenaventura assures that they have not detected an increase in the number of claims, which indicates that, at least for now, there are no problems with this situation.
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