2023-06-10 18:26:17
NNot that the interest rates of many banks on the savings of their customers could be called particularly high at the moment. While the European Central Bank (ECB) has now raised its deposit rate, at which interest is paid on bank deposits, to 3.25 percent, the average overnight interest rate for savers is just under 1.6 percent. Especially in the flat country there are often even less.
But not all customers get even these low interest rates. As can be seen from a survey by FMH-Finanzberatung, which is exclusively available to the FAZ, many banks then stagger their low interest rates again according to the amount of deposits made by savers. While large deposits were sometimes penalized in terms of interest rates during the negative interest phase, it is now exactly the opposite: if you have little, you don’t get much. According to FMH, a good one in five banks is currently doing this. In the study, this was currently the case for 105 of 461 banks.
An example: At the Kreissparkasse Erding-Dorfen in the Munich area, customers up to 10,000 euros simply get 0 percent interest for overnight money. This increases to 0.15 percent for amounts between 10,000 and 50,000 euros, to 0.2 percent for deposits between 50,000 and 500,000 euros and to 0.3 percent for amounts above 500,000 euros. Similar scales can also be found at Volksbanks, for example from 0.05 percent interest for deposits under 2500 euros to 0.5 percent for deposits of 100,000 euros. But even the latter is of course not really much.
Graduated interest rates are not a completely new phenomenon. The Federal Association of Volks- und Raiffeisenbanken (BVR) rightly points out that even before the low-interest phase, interest rates depended on the amount of savings deposits, before interest rates more or less disappeared completely for a few years. Only: Of course, there were no graduated interest rates of between 0.5 and 0.05 percent in the past. This is a current phenomenon: Even though the ECB has raised its key interest rate, as banks have been demanding for many years, savings interest rates remain extremely low, especially for many existing customers of banks and savings banks.
ECB relies on competition for deposits
“What to do, says Zeus”, the former Cologne economics professor Wolfgang Kitterer likes to quote Friedrich Schiller in the face of such apparently hopeless economic situations: “The world is given away, autumn, the hunt, the market is no longer mine.” In Schiller’s poem “The Division of the Earth”, in which the poor poet got nothing from the division of the world due to his somewhat late appearance, is the solution that the father of the gods gives him: “Do you want to live with me in my heaven – as often as you come , it should be open to you.” Kitterer then liked to say that the heaven of economists is competition, which can often achieve amazing things even in difficult situations.
That is the hope that the ECB is also currently pinning on. ECB Vice President Luis de Guindos said last week at the presentation of the central bank’s Financial Stability Report that the ECB would not make any forecasts for savings rates. However, she expects that the tightening of excess liquidity, which is linked to her tightening of monetary policy, will trigger more competition among banks for savings deposits over time. And that with this competition, the banks’ deposit rates for their customers will rise.
At the moment, bank customers often seem to be lazy or have little time or interest in taking care of these matters, which allows many banks to pay very low interest rates on their savings, especially to their loyal existing customers. If you want higher interest rates, you have to change banks or at least move part of your money.
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