The Letters win the battle of the saver to the deposit after a year of rising rates

2023-09-05 14:08:23

Since the European Central Bank (ECB) began to raise interest rates more than a year ago, savers have been demanding the same agility from their entities so that they get better remuneration for their deposits, just as they have done when raising mortgages. However, the slowdown in this process has prompted a good part of citizens to opt for alternatives such as Treasury Bills. The State debt has confirmed this Tuesday its good state of health for thousands of small investors eager for profitability and security: the institution has placed almost 5,000 million euros in Letters with an interest of 3.6% at six months, a historical level for this type of product.

This last auction has resulted in an even higher return for the Bills, not only for six, but also for 12 months. In fact, in both cases, the interest offered is practically the same, which reveals how the rises in official rates have been transferred to the debt market and, at the same time, the high demand from individuals to get a slice of their savings, which have been virtually flat since the pandemic.

The final interest on the six-month bills is the highest since mid-2012. Then the debt crisis in which the Spanish economy was immersed led investors to demand a very high rate to buy Spanish sovereign debt. In the case of one-year bills, interest is similar to that of the previous auction, although it has fallen slightly from the record it reached in previous operations when it reached 3.8%.

The interest of individuals in the Spanish debt reached its peak at the beginning of the year, when queues of citizens even appeared at the headquarters of the Bank of Spain to acquire Treasury Bills without the intermediation of banks. In this Thursday’s auction, non-competitive requests, which are those that arrive through the web and correspond mostly to small investors, have exceeded 540 million euros.

Savers will have a new opportunity to make the money accumulated in their accounts and deposits profitable next Thursday, although it will already be in a very long-term auction, with 10 and 30-year Treasury Obligations. These first issues of September will be followed by another on the 12th, with bills for three and nine months, and another on the 21st, with government bonds and obligations.

The movements in the private debt market come after a long journey of bank deposits, whose profitability has remained at a minimum until practically the gates of summer after a year of rate hikes from 0% to 4% in the ECB. The data handled by the ECB indicate that banks remunerate an average of 2.2% on 12-month deposits of families. A figure that is still far from the average for the euro zone and the 3.5% that is around in countries like France or Italy, but that is easily better than the 1.85% they paid in May.

The jump experienced by deposits can be partly explained by the pressure exerted by clients so that their banks pay them better for their savings. A part of the citizens -in general, those with the best profiles in view of the entities themselves- are pressing to improve these returns. Although they always get it when they contract other products or under certain conditions required by the branches.

From the financial sector they insist that deposit rates have marked a “normal” path in the last year if the conditions of a banking market such as the Spanish one are taken into account. They argue that the rates applied to mortgages are lower than in the rest of Europe and that savings have been adapted over time. The abundance of liquidity that the entities had after recent years watered by the ECB’s monetary measures have influenced this delay by giving more money for deposits.

This same Monday, the economic vice president, Nadia Calviño, met with the main bank executives (Santander, BBVA, CaixaBank, Sabadell, Bankinter, Abanca, Cajamar, among others) in a meeting in which the need once again conveyed to them that they improve their interest policy on deposits. She, although she, in the end, will not put any measure in place to force the bank to do so, as Calviño herself had hinted at the beginning of the summer.