Residents' deposits "moved" and bank wealth management expanded by 2 trillion yuan

China Business News

2024-05-18 08:05Published on the official account of Heilongjiang China Business News

Our reporter Ci Yupeng reports from Beijing

As the bond market continued to decline, the scale of wealth management increased by more than 2 trillion yuan month-on-month in April.

At the same time, according to the data recently released by the central bank, RMB deposits increased by 7.32 trillion yuan in the first four months of this year, compared with the data of the central bank in the first quarter, and the monthly RMB deposits decreased by 392 million yuan in April. Among them, household deposits shrank by 1.85 trillion yuan, and deposits of non-financial enterprises shrank by 1.87 trillion yuan.

Industry insiders told the "China Business Daily" reporter that the scale of wealth management increased month-on-month, because the overall wealth management products have obtained stable and good returns recently; At the same time, as the impact of interest rate cuts on bank deposits is gradually revealed, the cost performance of wealth management has been further improved, and many funds have turned to bank wealth management products with higher cost performance.

Some industry insiders pointed out that the mutual transformation between deposits and wealth management is a normal phenomenon, although the scale of RMB deposits decreased in April, but at present, there has been no fundamental and trendy change in the willingness of residents and enterprises to save, and microeconomic entities, especially residents, will still show a high willingness to save and investment intentions with low risk appetite in general.

Renminbi deposits declined

According to the "April 2024 Financial Statistics Report" recently released by the central bank, the balance of RMB deposits at the end of April was 291.59 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6.6%. In the first four months, RMB deposits increased by 7.32 trillion yuan. Among them, household deposits increased by 6.71 trillion yuan, deposits of non-financial enterprises decreased by 1.65 trillion yuan, financial deposits decreased by 187.4 billion yuan, and deposits of non-banking financial institutions increased by 1.23 trillion yuan.

According to the previously released "March 2024 Financial Statistics Report", at the end of March, the balance of RMB deposits was 295.51 trillion yuan. RMB deposits increased by 11.24 trillion yuan in the first quarter. Among them, household deposits increased by 8.56 trillion yuan, deposits of non-financial enterprises increased by 222.5 billion yuan, fiscal deposits decreased by 285.5 billion yuan, and deposits of non-banking financial institutions increased by 1.56 trillion yuan.

Wang Qing, chief macro analyst of Oriental Jincheng, judged: "There are three main reasons for the decrease in the scale of RMB deposits in April. First, due to factors such as the idling of governance funds, the large maturity of government bonds, and the slow pace of local government bond issuance, the new social financing in the month was negative, which will directly lead to a decrease in deposits derived from loans and bond financing. Second, April is the first month after the end of the first quarter, and some residents' deposits are 'moved' to wealth management, which is a seasonal phenomenon. Third, the recent regulatory suspension of the 'manual interest supplement' method of high-interest savings. ”

Yang Haiping, a researcher at the Securities and Futures Research Institute of the Central University of Finance and Economics, told reporters: "The reasons for the decrease in RMB deposits in April: First, the impact of quarter-end factors. Generally speaking, because the bank's quarterly assessment, especially at the end of the first quarter, is the time to cash out the rewards for the good start activities, there will often be a situation of financial return and high deposit growth. In April, after the end of the first quarter, there will be a high increase in wealth management and a slowdown in deposit growth. Second, the central bank has promoted commercial banks to rectify high-interest savings products. Third, the low-interest rate environment has stimulated the willingness of some economic entities to find alternatives to deposits to a certain extent. ”

According to the reporter's understanding, since January 1, 2024, a number of banks have successively lowered deposit interest rates. For example, the Bank of Guilin announced that it will adjust the interest rate of some deposit products from May 8, of which the annual interest rate of 5-year deposits will be adjusted to 2.8%, a decrease of 40 basis points from before; Harbin Bank announced in April that the interest rate on the 3-year lump sum deposit was lowered from 2.25% to 2.05%, and the interest rate on the 5-year lump sum deposit was lowered from 2.3% to 2.0%.

In terms of the structure of deposit products, large-amount deposit products have been adjusted and contracted recently, and smart notice deposits have been removed from the shelves one after another. The reporter learned that, on the one hand, a joint-stock bank recently suspended the sale of large-amount certificate of deposit products with a term of six months and above; On the other hand, a number of banks have recently removed smart notice deposits from the shelves, stopped automatic rollover, and customers need to make a notification appointment for withdrawal. The main purpose of the above adjustments is to reduce the cost of capital.

At the same time, the strict supervision of "manual interest supplementation" has also further promoted the decline in bank deposit income. In April, the self-discipline mechanism for market interest rate pricing issued the "Initiative on Prohibiting the Cultivation of Deposit Market Competition Order through Manual Interest Replenishment and High Interest Solicitation", requiring banks not to promise or pay supplementary interest to customers in any form that exceeds the authorized upper limit of the deposit interest rate, so as to maintain the order of reasonable competition in the market, strengthen the effect of deposit interest rate adjustment, and stabilize the cost of bank liabilities.

According to the relevant research report of Industrial Research, the yield of bank deposits has declined after the strict supervision of manual interest supplementation. From the perspective of "price", deposits are the liabilities of banks, and changes in deposit interest rates will change the bank's debt cost ratio, bonds are the bank's investable assets, and bond yields are part of the bank's asset returns. Strict supervision of manual interest rate payment has reduced the overall debt-to-cost ratio of banks, thereby easing the pressure on banks' interest margins.

However, "the monthly data has strong volatility, and it is difficult to assert that there has been a structural and trendy change in the direction of capital flows only by looking at the April data, and it needs to be continued to observe." Zhao Tingchen, a senior researcher at the Bank of China Research Institute, analyzed that compared with the rapid growth in the past period, it is possible that the growth rate of deposits will slow down in the future. In recent years, in order to stabilize the economy, the banking industry has stepped up efforts to support the real economy, and credit has maintained rapid growth. The growth of the asset side requires the matching of the liability side to provide financing for the placement of loans. To this end, banks have maintained greater efforts to absorb deposits, and the problem of some banks collecting deposits at high interest rates still exists, and factors such as capital market shocks and fluctuations in the wealth management market have continued to concentrate social funds on bank deposits.

Zhao Tingchen said: "At present, due to the rapid narrowing of net interest margins, although bank deposits and loans have grown rapidly, it is difficult to sustain 'making up prices with volume', and there has been a trend of declining profit growth in the banking industry in recent years. The mainland has entered a stage of high-quality development, and the evaluation of economic development achievements should not only be based on quantity, but also on quality. Similarly, in the future, to evaluate the quality and efficiency of the banking industry's services to the real economy, we should not pay too much attention to the scale of deposit and loan growth, but also look at the efficiency of financial services. Regulators have repeatedly proposed to revitalize existing financial resources and improve the efficiency of capital use. In the next step, banks should also moderately slow down the growth rate of scale and pay more attention to improving service quality and efficiency, which may also bring about a moderate slowdown in the growth rate of RMB deposits. ”

At the end of April, the year-on-year growth rate of M2, which is made up of all types of deposits, fell to 7.2%. Wang Qing said that the sharp decline in M2 growth at the end of April was more of a short-term fluctuation. In the later period, driven by the reversal of the effect of "balanced credit delivery", the continuous year-on-year increase in loans, and the retreat of the peak maturity of national bonds (the maturity scale of national bonds in April was 1,183.404 billion yuan, which dropped to 310.09 billion yuan in May), the opening of the issuance of ultra-long-term special treasury bonds, and the acceleration of the pace of local government bond issuance, the new social finance data will not only return to positive growth, but also increase year-on-year in some months. This will lead to a rebound in all types of deposits, and M2 growth is expected to rebound sharply to more than 8.0% by the end of May.

The scale of wealth management increased month-on-month

The central bank's "First Quarter Monetary Policy Implementation Report" pointed out that the rate of return on various assets such as on-balance sheet deposits and off-balance sheet off-balance sheet managed products will change relatively, which will affect residents' risk appetite and investment behavior, and residents will adjust their asset allocation accordingly, which is also an important factor affecting the proportion of residents' deposits.

According to the CITIC Securities research report, the scale of wealth management will increase to 29.28 trillion yuan in April 2024, far exceeding the previous forecast and breaking through the 29 trillion yuan mark. In addition, according to the statistics of Puyi Standard, as of April 30, 2024, the scale of bank wealth management products was 28.42 trillion yuan, an increase of 2.34 trillion yuan from the previous month.

Ming Ming, chief economist of CITIC Securities, believes that in addition to the 1.2 trillion yuan is the seasonal repair of the financial return table in March, there are three reasons for the high growth of the wealth management scale in April: first, the bond market has continued to be bullish since 2024, and the wealth management has also continued to have stable and good returns; Third, manual interest supplementation and high-interest savings are prohibited by supervision, and a large amount of funds spill over to cost-effective bank wealth management products.

Wang Qing told reporters: "Driven by the comprehensive monetary policy at the beginning of the year, banks, trusts and other financial institutions are facing a 'shortage of assets', the pace of government bond issuance is slow, and macro expectations are weak, and other factors, the interest rates in major markets have fallen sharply recently. Among them, the yield on 10-year Treasury bonds hit a more than 20-year low in April. Bond yields and bond prices run in the opposite direction, and the bond market has risen sharply recently, forming a 'siphon effect' of funds in stages. This is also an important reason for the month-on-month increase in the scale of wealth management products in April. This is contrary to the process of November 2022, when the expected increase in the transition period of epidemic prevention and control led to a sharp rise in bond market yields and large-scale redemptions of wealth management, which led to a high increase in deposits in the month. ”

Yang Haiping said: "The mutual transformation between deposits and wealth management is a normal phenomenon. The trend of commercial banks taking the initiative to adjust the deposit structure and strengthening the refined management of deposit interest payment costs is also very obvious, and there is indeed some room for commercial banks to reduce their deposit interest rates in the next step. Yang Haiping believes that at least for the time being, there has been no fundamental and trendy change in the willingness of residents and enterprises to save. Short-term loans to residents and medium- and long-term loans both decreased in April; The willingness of enterprises to borrow is also relatively weak, and there has been a negative growth in social finance, which reflects the confidence of microeconomic entities is still insufficient. In this case, microeconomic agents, especially residents, will still show a low risk appetite and a high willingness to save in general.