“Kommersant”: banks have raised the cost of paying interest on deposits for the first time in two years in the third quarter for the first time in two years, writes Kommersant. Experts predict an increase in payments due to the increase in the key rate of the Central Bank (CB).
According to bank reports, in the third quarter, individual depositors received 223 billion rubles in interest, which is five percent more than in the second quarter. At the same time, compared to the same period last year, expenses in the third quarter turned out to be 11 percent lower.
Until the end of the year, banks will pay customers even more due to the growth of the key rate and the expiration of the terms of deposits with low rates, believes Vyacheslav Putilovsky, junior director for bank ratings at Expert RA agency. Despite the low interest rates in previous years and the outflow of Russians 'funds to the stock markets, deposits occupy the largest part of banks' funding.
Maksim Stepochkin, head of the “Savings” department of VTB Bank, believes that banks will try to restrain the growth of interest rates on deposits by developing a savings service. The convenience of managing savings is more important to the client than an additional 0.2–0.3 percentage points to the interest rate, the expert said. Egor Lopatina, deputy director of the group of ratings of financial institutions of the NKR agency, suggested that banks minimize the amount of interest expenses by increasing the share of savings accounts. For a bank, they are cheaper than term deposits, the share of which is about 60 percent. In addition, the rate on savings accounts can be reduced without re-registration.
On October 22, the Central Bank raised the key rate by 0.75 percentage points at once – to 7.5 percent. The Central Bank noted the acceleration of inflation to 7.4-7.9 percent per annum. According to the regulator, the average maximum rate on deposits in the 10 largest Russian banks in the first third of October amounted to 6.43 percent.
The head of the Central Bank Elvira Nabiullina allowed further tightening of the monetary policy.