A senior MP has said Britain’s biggest banks are still failing their depositors.
Conservative MP Harriett Baldwin, chair of Parliament’s finance committee, accused the big four banks of “doing as little as possible” to reward savers.
She said Barclays, Lloyds, NatWest Group and HSBC were not doing enough to pass on higher interest rates to savers.
“The figures released last week continue to show signs that banks are trying to do as little as possible to reward our constituents for saving,” she said. “We will continue to pursue rewards for individual and corporate contributors.”
The Conservative MP spoke out after HSBC admitted rising interest rates helped the bank more than double profits to $7.7 billion in the latest quarter.
The London-based Asian bank, one of the world’s largest, said profits rose from $3.2 billion in the same period last year, driven by a 15 percent rise in net interest income – the difference between what it charges for loans and what he charges. on mortgages compared with the amount it pays out to depositors – up to $9.2 billion due to rising interest rates.
HSBC chief executive Noel Quinn said: “There was good, broad-based growth across all businesses and regions, supported by the interest rate environment.”
Under pressure from major Chinese shareholder Ping An, the bank announced a new $3 billion share buyback program to return money to its shareholders, bringing the total number of shares repurchased this year to $7 billion.
HSBC has set aside $1.1 billion to cover bad debts, including $500 million for the struggling Chinese property market.
Mr Quinn said HSBC believed China’s housing crisis had bottomed out and was unlikely to get worse, but warned the recovery could take time. “We shouldn’t equate the bottom of the market with no further problems,” he told analysts.
HSBC is the latest bank to report that higher funding costs helped it earn more income from mortgages and loans during the year.
Barclays said the savings market had become “extremely competitive” and reported a 6% fall in UK deposits.
Lloyds, the UK’s largest mortgage lender, said people were making the most of their savings. In the last quarter, around £3.2 billion was withdrawn from current account deposits and £3.9 billion was invested in savings.
NatWest shares fell last week after investors were alarmed by a forecast fall in the bank’s net interest margin. NatWest said it would have to increase payments to savers who moved money from current accounts to fixed deposits with higher interest rates.
“There is no doubt that many of our customers remain concerned about the future and many are changing their behavior to adapt to unprecedented changes to the base tariff, both in terms of volume and speed, and in terms of increased cost of living and business costs. height. is growing,” said Katie Murray, chief financial officer at NatWest.
The Finance Committee, a group of cross-party MPs who scrutinize the Treasury, earlier this year called on bank chiefs to explain why some of their savings rates are still well below the bank’s base rate in England.
Since then, peak interest rates on savings accounts have increased, with smaller specialist banks such as Paragon Bank paying the current base rate of 5.25 percent on their easy-to-access savings accounts.
Source: I News
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