Friday, April 9th, 2021
Allowances could shrink
Commerzbank is thinking about more penalty interest
Since 2014, banks have been paying penalty interest when they park funds with the ECB. A number of financial institutions have been passing the costs on to corporate and wealthy private customers for some time, including Commerzbank. This does not rule out penalty interest on further deposits.
Commerzbank does not rule out penalty interest on further deposits. “We will not pass on negative interest rates to the general public,” said Commerzbank board member Sabine Schmittroth the “Handelsblatt”. “But the question is where the end of the width is. Therefore, we will look at the amount of the allowances again and again.”
At Commerzbank, customers have to pay penalty interest if they have more than 100,000 euros in their account. Many other banks and savings banks have also set this amount as a limit above which customers have to pay fees for their credit. Sparda-Bank West recently pushed ahead and lowered the limit to 25,000 euros.
Pressure on banks to pass on the costs increases
Banks have been paying penalty interest since 2014 when they park excess funds with the European Central Bank (ECB). The so-called deposit rate is currently at minus 0.5 percent. At the same time, many banks and savings banks are flooded with deposits in the Corona crisis, so that the pressure to pass on the costs is increasing.
Labor director and head of private customers Schmittroth want to make rapid progress in implementing the announced job cuts. “The aim is to reach an agreement in principle by the beginning of May,” she affirmed. The top priority is to avoid redundancies for operational reasons as far as possible. She thinks little of the demands of the Verdi union, which wants to extend the job cuts until at least 2025. “We have clearly communicated that we want to cut 10,000 jobs by 2024.”
On April 1, Commerzbank announced that the “socially acceptable reduction” of 1,700 full-time positions by the end of 2021 had been agreed with the general works council via a volunteer program. It has set itself the goal of increasing the number of full-time positions in the group by the end of 2024 from almost 40,000 recently to 32,000 to reduce.
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