Bank depositors will be offered savings certificates

The government promises higher interest income

Vladimir Putin announced plans to launch a new financial instrument in Russia – savings certificates for a period of more than three years. We are talking about a registered security, which certifies that a person has a deposit, and that at the end of the placement period he has the right to withdraw the invested money with accrued interest. The purpose of the innovation (relative, however) is to support the banking sector by providing it with an impressive portion of liquidity from new clients.

“The certificate will be irrevocable, which means banks will be able to offer clients higher, more profitable interest income. And of course, these citizens’ funds will also be insured by the state in the amount of up to 2.8 million rubles,” Putin specified in his message to the Federal Assembly.

However, there is no answer yet to the question of how credit institutions will be able to offer higher rates on such instruments. Now the share of long-term money is extremely small – deposits with a maturity of more than three years account for only 1.6% (728.3 billion rubles) of the total volume of bank savings of individuals amounting to almost 44.9 trillion rubles. By the way, in the 1990s and 2000s, irrevocable certificates gained some popularity in the banking system, but ultimately did not take root.

“Most likely, this financial instrument is being created in order to attract more funds from individuals to the banking sector,” says Alexander Shneiderman, head of the sales and customer support department at Alfa-Forex. – On the one hand, such a savings certificate is a guarantee that a person will not withdraw his money for at least three years. And long-term deposits are welcomed by banks. At the same time, the state fully supports this mechanism by increasing the amount of insurance to 2.8 million rubles. Russians more often keep deposits of less than 1.4 million rubles in banks precisely for the reason that insurance only covers this amount.”

In theory, everything looks quite attractive, but it is unknown how popular these savings certificates will be. Their target audience is people who today store money in other instruments. We are mainly talking about those who have savings of several million rubles, summarizes Shneiderman.