MADRID (Reuters) – The Spanish government is planning to widen the anti-trust watchdog’s tools to analyze which factors are potentially limiting competition in the banking sector and preventing lenders from paying higher interest rates on retail deposits.
Spanish banks offer the lowest household deposit rates among the euro zone’s large economies, igniting demands from the government, supervisors and clients to pass on higher interest rates for savers.
“We urged the (watchdog) to analyze which may be the factors limiting the effective competition in that market,” Economy Minister Nadia Calvino said on Thursday.
Last Friday, the head of anti-trust body, Cani Fernandez, urged political parties to give her agency better tools to look into potential anticompetitive practices between banks when setting interest rates on deposits.
Fernandez did not say if banks had actually engaged in any explicit collusion or agreement not to raise deposit rates but added that the National Commission for Markets and Competition (CNMC) did not have the tools to prove the existence of such agreements between lenders.
“We are ordering the CNMC to undertake this study and eventually see if any legislative changes are needed,” Calvino said after meeting with banking and consumer associations and the Bank of Spain.
Earlier this month, the ECB raised its key interest rate to a 22-year high of 3.5%, increasing the cost of variable mortgage loans, which make up the vast majority of contracts in Spain.
Spanish banks have said that lower deposit yields are partly the result of excess liquidity.
A change of government and economic policy is possible during the summer as Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has called snap elections for next month.
(Reporting by Jesús Aguado and Inti Landauro; editing by Grant McCool)
