Annual fee, commissions for credit cards and for sending the paper account statement at home, costs for withdrawals to the ATM above a certain threshold, and then many hidden expenses such as those for payment cards not explicitly requested by the customer , up to those for the issue of checkbooks never asked. The list of taxes linked to the current account is long. If many consumers are constantly paying attention to what they pay and trying to lower quotas, others are totally unaware of what they pay. This was revealed by a survey conducted for Facile.it by mUp Research and Norstat. The report highlighted that the current account holders who, in July 2020, admitted that they did not know the costs are 5,900,000, that is to say almost 15% of the holders. It is a high audience of users of banking services who are not informed and many times end up paying more than they should. In particular, it was women (16.6% compared to 12.5% of the male sample) and respondents aged between 45 and 54 (17.3%) who knew the costs of their account less. .
Still many are excluded from the banking system
Another data emerges from the analysis: even if the use of the current account seems to be indispensable in everyday life, there are still those who do without it and 5% of the interviewees declare that in their family it is not there is a current account, a percentage which confirms the value recorded in February. Shifting the analysis to the respondents, it emerges that those who live without an account are mainly resident in the South (10%), are between 25 and 34 years old (10.6%) and are not employed (9.3%).
Current accounts and Covid
Continuing to scroll through the results of the survey, another interesting fact is to see how following the Covid emergency the perception and priorities of Italians on household expenses, and specifically on the current account, have changed. If in January 2020, before the outbreak of the pandemic, 17.3% of respondents considered the cost of the current account one of the heaviest items on the family budget and even 17.5% wanted to reduce its weight, following the emergency In the healthcare sector, the values dropped to 16.1% and 16.9% respectively in July 2020, a clear sign of how household attention has shifted to other cost items. In particular, respondents belonging to the age group 65-74 years perceive that the account has less impact on the family budget (12.4%) and only 8% of young people aged between 18 and 24 would like to be able to save money in this area.
Have the costs really gone up?
The analysis of Facile.it also revealed that 14.6% of account holders complained of an increase in the cost of their current account during the period March-June 2020 compared to the months preceding Covid. The data must be read in the light of the reference framework; it is probable that this was not an effective increase in the rates applied by the bank, but rather, once again, it is a perception resulting from the greater attention paid by account holders to costs, which has brought to their eyes increases already in place for some time but which has only been noticed in recent months. It should also be said that many Italians during the quarantine have increased the use of home banking services and the number of transactions made online and this may have in fact led to an increase in the weight of variable items of expenditure (e.g. wire transfers, top-ups of prepaid cards, money transfers etc.).
Many complain, few change
If on the one hand the survey highlighted how 16.9% of the respondents said they would like to save on their current account, on the other hand they also certified that few people turn the wish into reality; between respondents, between March and June 2020, only 4.8% of account holders, equal to 1,998,021 individuals, said they had changed their accounts, a low percentage, but that evidently suffers from objective logistical difficulties during the lockdown period.
On the other hand, looking at those who have changed their accounts, again according to the findings of Facile.it by mUp Research and Norstat, an interesting fact emerges; more than 1 in 4 (27%) did so because their bank did not provide a home banking service (in the previous survey, relating to the period January 2019-20, less than 10% of respondents changed for this reason). Even if the bank provided the service, however, it did not always do it in such a way as to satisfy the customer, so much so that, always among those who changed, 23% made the decision because they considered inadequate home banking offered by his institution.
The most prone to switch accounts were men (5.4% vs 4.3% of women), young people aged between 25 and 34 (9.5%) and residents in the Northeast (5, 8%).
If it is true that few have changed the account, it must be said that there are many account holders (32.9%) who have declared that they have not changed for the moment, but who will do so as soon as they find the right offer.
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