More than three months after the announcement that savings certificates (CA) could now be subscribed to in bank branches and digital channels, no financial institution is still selling them due to a lack of knowledge of their marketing terms. It is up to the Treasury and Public Debt Management Agency (IGCP) to announce this, DN/Dinheiro Vivo learned from the country’s main banking entities.
The decision to expand the sales network of these government bonds was implemented on June 2 through Regulation 149-A/2023, which suspended the sale of series E and established series F, with less attractive conditions, both in terms of the maximum base rate ( 2, 5% against 3.5% of the previous one), as well as the term (15 years instead of ten) and the maximum subscription ceiling per savings account, which decreased from 250 thousand to 50 thousand units.
Specifically, the diploma states that “a subscription to F series savings certificates can be carried out through AforroNet, in the stores of CTT – Correios de Portugal, in the network of Espaços Cidadão da AMA – Agency for Administrative Modernization, or in networks of physical or digital documents of any financial or payment institution registered with Banco de Portugal and designated for this purpose by IGCP”.
At the time, the government justified these changes with, on the one hand, the ‘misalignment between the fees for series E savings certificates and the remaining sources of financing in the Portuguese Republic’, and with the ‘objective of increasing competition in the distribution of savings accounts’, savings and reduction of distribution costs’, on the other.
But the fact is that so far the Post Office, Espaços Cidadão and the AforroNet channel have not lost the exclusivity of marketing savings certificates and that, almost four months later, the banks are still waiting for instructions on the contours of this whole process of deciding if they will be interested in selling them in the future.
In statements to DN/Dinheiro Vivo, the Portuguese Association of Banks (APB) clarified that it “does not and cannot have any form of interference” in this matter, and that it is directly related to the “commercial strategy of each institution”.
The IGCP, questioned by DN/Dinheiro Vivo on the reason for the delay regarding instructions to banks, did not provide any clarification until the end of this edition. The contours of the terms for the sale of those bonds by financial institutions remain unknown, and the agency that manages Portugal’s sovereign debt has said nothing about when it plans to make them public.
Above all, there are doubts as to whether the state will pay the banks the same commission that it pays to CTT for subscriptions to savings certificates, namely between 0.585% and 0.26%, according to the president of the IGCP, Miguel Martín, during a parliamentary hearing in the Committee on Budget and Finance, early February.
Delaying subscriptions
The end of the E series and its replacement by the F series led to several criticisms from opposition parties, namely the Bloco de Esquerda and PCP, who considered this measure as a concession to the banks – this is because only in the first five months of 2023, banks had already lost 8.7 billion euros in deposits from private individuals, while savings bonds, which paid more, had collected 12.9 billion euros.
The accusation was quickly dismissed by the executive, who denied any pressure or influence from the panel. The Secretary of State for Finance, João Nuno Mendes, confirmed in this decision at the time the “total independence” of the government, namely the IGCP, and said that such changes had been planned since April and that they had just not been implemented earlier. due to the “complexity of the process.”
And the trend continued in the following months, falling by 42% in July to 389.5 million euros, and by 34% in August to 258.2 million euros. Despite the slowdown caused by interest loss among households, the stock of this savings product amounted to 33.8 billion euros at the end of the eighth month, the highest value ever, compared to 13.9 billion in August last year.
At the beginning of this month, CTT president João Bento, in statements to the newspaper Eco, hypothesized that the government would introduce changes to savings certificates later this year, both in terms of reward and maximum limits per person. But DN/Dinheiro Vivo knows that this possibility is not being investigated by the Ministry of Finance.
Source: DN
