Household deposits diminish for banks
Yesterday's paper on bank interest margins by the Reserve Bank of Australia also sheds a little more light on the deposit mix of banks.Of the 53 per cent of liabilities of major banks funded through domestic deposits the RBA said nine percentage points were for transaction accounts, 26 percentage points were savings accounts and 18 percentage points were term deposits.The percentage of major bank funding sourced from domestic deposits is reported by the RBA in a second table to be 49 per cent rather than 53 per cent.Across the banking sector the RBA estimated that banks currently raise around 43 per cent of their funding from deposits. All deposits are not the same, though. Only about 43 per cent of these deposits are sourced from households, 46 per cent from financial and non-financial corporates, and the remainder from governments and non-profit organisations. That means household deposits account for only 18.5 per cent of the funding of the entire banking sector in Australia, and are a diminishing proportion of bank liabilities despite the apparent race for liquidity by households over the last two years.Retail deposits accounted for 20 per cent of bank funding at June 2007, an earlier study by the RBA showed. In seeking to analyse data on banks' deposit books and pricing the RBA noted that there is a lack of publicly available data on changes in the composition of banks' deposits. The RBA assumed for its analysis that the composition of deposit funding has been relatively stable ove the last two years.