Major Chinese banks cut high-yield deposit products to ease margin pressure

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BEIJING, Dec 3 (Reuters) – Some major Chinese commercial banks have removed five-year, large-scale certificates of deposit that carry a high yield from their offerings, in an effort to cut costs and offset margin pressure.

Banks including Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and Agricultural Bank of China (AgBank) now only offer shorter-term, large-scale CDs ranging from six months to three years, according to the banks’ mobile applications.

The shorter-term deposit products carry interest rates around 1.2% to 1.8%, compared with the five-year, large-scale CDs that offer interest rates of about 2% to 2.1%.

ICBC and AgBank didn’t immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment.

Chinese banks are grappling with shrinking profit margins as they are urged by the government to support a slowing economy. Lowering deposit rates would give banks much-needed wiggle room to cut lending rates.

According to official data, Chinese commercial banks said their net interest margins – a key gauge of profitability – stood at a record low of 1.42% at the end of the third quarter, flat from the quarter before.

Smaller banks, which face more acute margin pressure, had already begun taking similar measures.

Last month, several rural banks in China’s Inner Mongolia region and Yunnan province said they would stop offering five-year fixed-term deposits and lowered rates on shorter-term products.

In May, major state banks lowered deposit rates as authorities cut benchmark lending rates to help buffer the economy from the impact of the U.S.-China trade war.

Successive cuts to deposit rates in recent years have failed to curb explosive growth in Chinese household savings, intensifying concerns over the side effects that lower returns have on the country’s consumers, who tend to build their own safety net.

(Reporting by Ziyi Tang and Ryan Woo; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus)