According to a study by the Comité Consultatif du Secteur Financier (CCSF), bank charges will remain relatively stable in 2020. On the other hand, the consumer association UFC-Que Choisir believes that the information made available to customers is complex and does not promote clarity.
Stable rates with some variations
To coincide with the publication of new bank fee schedules between the end of December 2019 and the beginning of January 2020, the CCSF compared the fees for 14 standard services from 109 establishments, including 101 network banks and 8 online banks.
The study shows that six tariffs remain stable: subscriptions to products offering alerts on account status by SMS (unit cost), subscriptions to remote banking services, intervention fees and cash withdrawals (in the case of euro withdrawals within the euro zone from another bank's ATM). Internet transfers and direct debits remain free of charge.
Five tariffs are down. The biggest reduction concerns the fee for setting up a SEPA direct debit mandate (-6.8%). The other marginal decreases concern the supply of systematic authorization payment cards (-0.85%), loss or theft of means of payment insurance (-0.2%), subscriptions to products offering account status alerts by SMS (flat-rate cost -0.13%) and the supply of deferred debit international payment cards (-0.1%).
Then there are three rate increases. These increases apply to occasional in-branch transfers (+4.1%), account maintenance (+3.17%) and fees for international debit cards (+0.8%).
Information overload according to UFC-Que Choisir
In its study, the CCSF recalls Decree no. 2018-774 of September 5, 2018, which introduced the obligation for banks to provide their customers with a tariff information document (DIT), using standardized terminology, with a common denomination of the main banking fees and services in all European Union countries. The aim is to standardize information to make it easier for customers to compare different charges.
Since 2010, French banks have been committed to providing another document, the standard extract of tariffs (EST). The gradual disappearance of the EST in favor of the DIT considerably muddies the waters, according to the consumer association UFC-Que Choisir, which believes that some banks are overloading their customers with too much information in their DITs.
UFC-Que Choisir is calling on the public authorities to legislate, demanding that the TSE be maintained and requiring that only the most widely marketed banking package appear on information documents, in the interests of clarity.
The French Banking Federation reacted by stating that the DIT was "quite simply a European version of the standard extract of tariffs developed and used by banks in France for many years", and that banks were therefore free to decide whether or not to keep it in place.