Around 27 million euros of commissions and undue interest have been returned to bank clients since 2019, announced the deputy governor of the Bank of Portugal, considering that the central bank’s action in protecting consumers is effective.
In the inspection processes completed in 2019, 2020 and 2121, “the economic value returned to bank customers as a result of the action [de fiscalização] of the Bank of Portugal was of the order of 27 million euros”, said this Wednesday the deputy governor, Luís Máximo dos Santos, in a parliamentary audience.
Of that amount, 20.8 million euros for situations of irregularities in the collection of commissions and 6.9 million euros for the correction of irregularities in the collection of interest”, he specified, considering that these refunds were related to charges made in contravention of the provisions of the law.
This is often not due to an intrinsic perversity of the institutions, but rather to poorly calibrated computer systems, programs that did not get it right”, explained Luís Máximo dos Santos.
The deputy governor was speaking at a hearing at the Bank of Portugal (BdP) requested by the PS parliamentary group on the evolution of bank commissions and their reasonableness and proportionality, after the Deco association published a study in May concludes that there is an average increase of 47% in annual costs of the main products and services associated with the current accounts of the banks BPI, Novo Banco, Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Santander and Millennium BCP.
The lieutenant governor admitted that “perhaps they are creating” macroeconomic conditions so that bank commissions “eventually go down.”
Banks don’t want to alienate customers either, they need them, and so the explanation that negative interest rates had increased fees, which is true, now has less of that element,” he said.
The lieutenant governor also admitted that the change in the “scenery” of the financial system, with the emergence of the ‘fintech’, competitively puts pressure on traditional banks, which also considers it “possible to produce” the same effect of lower commissions.
“But the commissions will not disappear”he underlined, noting that “there are many” costs that the bank has to bear and that the charging of all commissions cannot be prohibited under penalty of severely sanctioning the bank.
We need solid banks, which can correspond to the mission they have in the economy”, he said, considering that banks have responded to that mission in the context of the pandemic and defending that the protection of banking rights has improved in recent years, while acknowledging that “banks have a lot to do”.
Still in the audience, and regarding the value of the commissions, the director of the BdP Behavior Supervision Department, Maria Lúcia Leitão, reminded the deputies that there are many whose value is set administratively, by legislation, and that the central The bank merely examines, challenging members to change committees if they deem it necessary.
Source: Observadora
