A third of retail customers changed banks last year, playing havoc with forecasts.
Pressure from regulators and fear of fickle wholesale funding markets has spurred bank treasurers to seek to boost their institutions’ retail liabilities. That’s a big change: depositors were often spurned during the pre-crisis boom years, with banks “off-boarding” lower-return customers by hiking fees and cutting services. But depositors are now the belles of the banking ball.
The problem is a good percentage of them are sick of their banks and voting with their feet. In fact, 36 percent of bank customers globally changed their main bank last year, according to a recent Ernst & Young survey.
The poll of 20,500 retail customers around the world (“A New Era of Customer Expectation: Global Consumer Banking Survey 2011”) showed that the rebound in bank profitability last year did not stop the slide in customer confidence. Some 44 percent of the sought-after retail customers E&Y surveyed said their trust in their banks fell markedly. In the US the figure was 55 percent.
The effect of this was most pronounced in Europe, where nearly 40 percent of survey participants changed their main bank last year. Half of those who changed banks cited poor service as their reason, while another 43 percent said pricing spurred their move.
That complicates life for bank treasurers. Price competition for deposits is usually a bad sign; indeed it is one of the red flags that can prompt the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to start sniffing around. Healthy banks today typically offer minimal or negative real interest rates. It’s the basket cases that offer significantly above-market returns, knowing the risk they take will be ultimately borne by taxpayers. But this strategy pressures net interest margins and becomes more painful as regulators force banks to cut fees on things like debit card interchange fees.
The decline in confidence is not apparent in those developing economies that were less affected by the financial crisis. In some of them, trust in banks actually rose. But for treasurers of banks in developed economies, the dream of a low-beta deposit base, however attractive it may be from a planning and risk management point of view, could be hard to achieve.