(Finance) – Le banks with highly digital customers they have not recorded a movement in sight deposits that is too different from that of traditional institutions during the phase of interest rate increases implemented by the ECB in recent years. This is what emerges from a focus of the Bank of Italy’s second Financial Stability Report of 2024.
Via Nazionale points out that recently, also following the banking crisis episodes observed abroad in the spring of 2023, a debate on the relationship between stability of intermediaries’ collections and customers’ propensity to use digital channels. With the spread of remote access to banking services (from a PC or smartphone), customers can move their deposits more easily and faster than in the past. In times of tension or in the event of shock this could make the outflow of the deposits more rapid. “The empirical evidence on this topic is scarce – it is underlined – only some works relating to the United States are available, which have not achieved mutually consistent results”.
To investigate the relevance of the phenomenon the Bank of Italy has analyzed the consequences of the increase in rates associated with monetary restriction started in July 2022 on the amount of deposits of Italian banks (on demand and fixed-term, of families and businesses) and on the related interest rates in the period January 2021-December 2023. The Italian intermediaries were distinguished based on an indicator that approximates customers’ propensity to use the online channel for money transfers. In particular, “banks with highly digital customers” are defined as those which in the four quarters preceding the start of the restriction had a significant share of bank transfers arranged online by customers (over 89 percent of the total, corresponding to the highest quintile of the distribution ).
The analysis indicates that, other conditions being equal, for this category of banks the increase in official rates was associated on average with a reduction in sight deposits of families and businesses of a similar magnitude to that observed for other intermediaries; even for the interest rates on these deposits no significant differences emerge. THE household term deposits they instead grew for all intermediaries, but thethe increase was on average more significant for those of banks with highly digital customers; the latter also increased the rates on new deposits attributable to this category to a higher extent.
One possible interpretation of this evidence, writes the Bank of Italy, is that banks with highly digital customers have on average exploited the phase of rise in official rates to rebalance its fundingorienting it towards a more stable form (household term deposits). On the other hand, it is also possible that these intermediaries, aware that they are addressing customers who are more attentive to the conditions applied, may have decided to change rates more quickly of interest offered on term deposits, both to mitigate potential outflows and to attract new customers.
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