Deposits in savings accounts in the financial system have been falling in recent months, at the same time that there has been a dynamism in the certificates of deposit term (CDT) because of the lure of high interest rates.
According to the figures of the Bank of the Republicat the end of April the balance reached $268 billion, with a drop of 29% compared to the beginning of the year, when this was $297 billion and compared to the same date in 2022 the decrease represented 9.1% and the figure reached $295 billion.
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And although these two deposit products from financial institutions have differences in terms of their vocation and, therefore, rates, at some moments in 2022 they had a similar behavior in the context of high interest rates, which were transmitted from the applied by the Bank of the Republic to the market.
And although in the case of the CDTs in the reference to a one-year term, the average rate in April was 13.93% effective annual (EA), with a fall of 3.07 percentage points compared to January, the rate continues to be attractive, under the understanding that inflation already showed a significant decline in April.
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Despite the fact that the interest rates of the loans remain high, driven by the transmission that the market makes of the increase made by the Bank of the Republic, the deposits reached their maximum at the end of 2022.
According to the statistics of the Bank of the Republic, when looking at the figures on a monthly basis, the balance of savings accounts decreased 1.75%, from $272 billion in March to $268 billion in the fourth month of the year.
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It is worth remembering that at the end of 2021, the balance of savings accounts within the financial system reached $296 billion, which represented, at the time, an increase of 19.4% compared to the balance with which it closed 2020 and 48.3% compared to an immediately previous year, when the amounts were $248 billion and $199 billion, respectively.
On the other hand, it should be mentioned that, in absolute terms, the increase in these accounts last year was less than $1 trillion.
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In accordance with Andrés Langebaek Rueda, Director of Economic Studies of the Davivienda Groupthere is a negative or inverse relationship between the balances of the savings accounts and the CDT, because as the interest rates of these investment instruments have risen, the same has happened with their balances and consequently those of the accounts have depressed .
“When rates are low, people prefer to have liquidity in their accounts, since they do not have a high opportunity cost, but in an environment of high rates, when balancing liquidity with profitability, they opt for the latter.”, he assures.
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