Late in February 2009, the Central Bank of Kenya released their bank charges survey (PDF). The earlier comments after the last survey still apply mainly:
1 It’s a good read
2 Customer satisfaction/service should be measured (it’s not just about costs)
3 Savings accounts do attract charges (and pay very little interest)
Banking will probably get cheaper as banks adapt to competition from mobile companies –i.e. Safaricom M-Pesa and Zap from Zain which are becoming become mini e-wallets.
Also found was a recent article on avoidable bank charges – which were:
1 overdraft fees
2 ATM fees (that means avoid pesa point and Visa charges)
3 Minimum balance fees
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Kaylee
http://www.craigslistdecoded.info
Banks plse replace your link with this one http://www.centralbank.go.ke/downloads/bsd/Survey2009.pdf.
I’m kind of surprised banks are not looking to increase saving i rates given gok hopes to do more bonds.
Those loan rates make my eyes water. No wonder banks make such margins.
Is ECOBank looking at the Equity space with those copycat pricing?
MainaT: Whereas the spreads look & are high, they are forced to place (at leas) 5% with the CBK at ZERO interest!
So if you place 100/- into an account at a bank, they have to ‘give’ 5/- to CBK. Unfair coz many countries’ central banks pay the banks interest on the 5/-.
So if you take average loan rate of 16% less 5%, you are left with 11% then maybe another 5% to cover costs. I’d say 6% for every deposit is something most western banks would give anything to get at in even in credit-crunch free good yrs.
Bank overdraft fees are becoming absolutely ridiculous. On my site, we get 4-5 people a day complaining about being unfairly charged. Bank of America has just agreed to now charges up to 10 overdraft fees per day at $39 a pop. Considering how they re-order transactions to optimize their fees, this is going to seriously hurt even more customers. Its time to stand up against these policies and demand change.