The Italians confirm themselves as a people of savers, with sums of money left prudently to lie in interest-free current accounts. However, it is money that is going to vanish, at least from the point of view of purchasing power, given that reference is often made to non-interest bearing bank current accounts.
According to the data collected by “Deposit Solutions”, a company that manages the Open Banking platform for savings deposits, in Italy the phenomenon has now reached its peak. By April 2020, the figure of 795 billion euros deposited in current accounts, with an increase of 37.5% compared to 2015. Again according to what was examined by “Deposit Solutions”, 68% of these savings would remain on interest-free current accounts. A minimal amount (we are talking about 5%) ends up on term deposits with a limited return.
The habit of letting money languish in deposits infruttiferi it does not belong only to the citizens of the beautiful country. Apparently, in fact, in prudence we are overtaken by Spain, which has 86% of the money saved on current accounts, with 17,700 euros per capita. Similar to us, on the other hand, Germany, which stands at 66%, and England, at 68%. As mentioned above, the phenomenon is constantly increasing. At a European level, we have gone from 39% savings on current accounts recorded in 2015 to 50% in 2020. In about 5 years, therefore, we have gone from 2,547 billion to 3,984 billion left on current accounts. No substantial change, however, with regard to the money entrusted to savings accounts, overnight accounts and fixed-term accounts: the total remains around 4 thousand billion.
“Much of the money of Italians remains parked in interest-free accounts instead of being used in term deposits and this entails a loss of return for savers year after year, even in times of low interest rates. interest“, explains Ermanno Ciarrocchi, of “Deposit Solutions”, as reported by “The sun 24 hours”. Due to the so-called “hidden tax”, ie inflation, in the last 5 years Italians have had a loss of purchasing power equal to 22 billion. The number grows exponentially if the entire European Union is taken into consideration. Good for the banks, which have so considerable resource available, however, explains Ciarrocchi,“Term-bound liquidity would give banks benefits linked to a better alignment between assets and liabilities, because this money could be used to cover medium and long-term assets such as business or consumer credit”.
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