Sun, Dec 22 2024
SMEs in the UK have faced challenging macroeconomic conditions recently, and many are finding it difficult to survive since availability to financing looks to have declined. The bank for businesses, Allica Bank, has released new research revealing that British high-street banks withheld almost £200 million in savings interest from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) last month.
Allica Bank contends that the top six banks paid SMEs significantly less than they deserved on their hard-earned money since they offered subpar interest rates that stayed the same for months.
The typical SME in the UK has business savings of about £75,000, yet the major banks give an average of less than 1.6% interest on this amount.
The top challenger bank rate, meanwhile, has remained stable at 4.33 percent, a discrepancy of almost three percent, which translates to an extra £172 in monthly savings for individual SMEs.
When considering the entire SME market, large banks withheld over £208 million in savings interest from British SMEs just last month due to the difference in savings rates they gave compared to competitors. The money that businesses maintain in current accounts that receive no interest is not included in this statistic.
The CEO of Allica Bank, Richard Davies, stated: "SMEs nationwide are being fleeced of their business savings." It may be seen that nothing is changing by monitoring the rates that big banks provide to their small company clients.
"Since the Bank of England Base Rate has been steadily above five percent for nearly a year, banks have no justification for not offering their SME clients higher savings rates.
"It just seems to me that they don't appreciate their small business customers, given the rates that are being offered to SMEs are still stagnant. Every dollar matters during this extremely difficult moment to be a business owner in the UK.
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With regard to comparable SME savings products, Allica's new SME Monthly Savings Tracker tracks the average savings rates provided by major banks in comparison to the interest rates offered by challenger banks.
It draws attention to an ongoing and notable discrepancy in the rates that challenger banks provide SMEs compared to those of their more established, larger competitors.
This information confirms the findings of the bank's earlier study, which indicated that SMEs are owed over £7.5 billion in "missing" savings interest annually. Smaller businesses typically receive much lower interest rates from big banks than from larger ones, and in many cases, receive no interest at all on their savings.
The study monitors the best rates offered by the challenger banks each month and compares them with those of the UK's six biggest incumbent lenders: Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Nationwide, NatWest, and Santander.
Allica Bank is continuing to push banks and other financial institutions to provide small companies with greater rates on their savings so that the money can be reinvested in local economies, in line with the most recent monthly savings tracker.
The Great British Savings Squeeze is a campaign that Allica began to address the issue of lack of transparency in the business savings market. Allica recently written to the Treasury Select Committee (TSC) requesting that MPs look into the matter.
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