(Bloomberg) -- Taiwan’s biggest banks are stepping up efforts to lure deposits from both individuals and companies, responding to regulator demands for them to reduce a key ratio tracking their exposure to the island’s hot housing market.
Multiple bank employees told Bloomberg News that domestic lenders are aggressively seeking both Taiwan dollars and foreign currencies. Lenders are targeting institutions, including insurers and corporates, and retail investors to fulfill internal deposit targets, they said, asking not to be identified as they are not authorized to speak publicly.
In August, Governor Yang Chin-long met officials from 34 banks to underscore concerns about Taiwan’s high property prices and the risks for banks. Regulators asked for improvement plans to reduce the ratio of mortgages to deposits and debentures to well below the legal maximum of 30%, leaving the island’s banks, which have always been highly liquid, in the rare position of seeking more funds from depositors.
“The ratio at banks is likely to remain at a high level as property loans are an important income channel,” said Cherry Huang, an analyst at Fitch Ratings, who said the central bank has a “very conservative” regulatory stance. “As regulators are likely to still encourage banks to diversify loans, overseas advances may become more important for banks’ revenue.”
Although it is unclear how long the phenomenon will last, the effort to curb the key ratio could slow lending and crimp profits as banks pay more for deposits.
Some 15 banks had ratios above 27% at the end of October, with four over 28%, according to Financial Supervisory Commission data. The central bank declined to comment.
“The main business of a bank is to take deposits from the public in order to sustain its business momentum,” Hou Li-yang, deputy director general of the FSC’s Banking Bureau said at a regular briefing in Taipei Tuesday.
“Banks can set interest rates in accordance with their internal and external liquidity risks, which is a matter of bank autonomy,” he said. “However, as banks raise funds through short-term liabilities, they should pay attention to liquidity risk control.”
On Dec. 13, Taiwan’s banks took more than NT$40 billion ($1.2 billion) of special time deposits, with one month rates of up to 1.75% and three months of 1.76%, according to central bank data. On Monday Dec. 16, they took in over NT$20 billion of special deposits.
The special deposits are sometimes only available for a short period, and central bank data shows many transactions of around NT$10 million ($310,000), but deposits of NT$1 billion have been seen.
The island’s central bank is scheduled to hold a board meeting on Thursday Dec. 19, with investors watching in case there are more real estate-related credit curbs. At its August meetings with banks, the central bank warned it will take action if lenders don’t act on their own to reduce risk.
“If moral suasion towards banks doesn’t affect the trend, we might implement direct measures,” Alan Pan, director general of the central bank’s banking department, said on Aug. 21.
Before the August meetings with banks, Taiwan’s central bank had enacted multiple measures to tighten mortgage lending, with limited effectiveness.
So in September, the central bank authority unveiled the seventh round of credit controls to cool the property market, reducing the amount of money people can borrow for second homes. At the same time, it hiked the reserve requirement ratio by 25 basis points, acting for the second time this year to increase the amount banks must hold in reserve.
Read: Taiwan Raises RRR Again to Cool Off Property Market, Holds Rate
That is having some effect on transactions, if not necessarily on prices. Total housing deals in the October and November for six major cities in Taiwan were the lowest since February, which was affected by lunar new year holidays.
(Adds comment from FSC in seventh and eighth paragraphs.)
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