Sat, Feb 11 2012

Bulgarian banks go hard on loan applicants

Wed, Apr 08 2009 11:48 CET

byDnevnik.bg

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Bulgarian banks go hard on loan applicants

Photo: Maria Subotinova

Bulgarian banks put up loan rates and fees, pulled consumer lending products and ended promotions in February as the global financial meltdown raged on, data from personal finance website moitepari.bg, which compares the offers of Bulgarian lenders, showed.

DSK Bank, Raiffeisenbank and Emporiki Bank dropped unsecured consumer loan offers from their portfolios. Emporiki also requires guarantors for consumer loans of more than 5000 leva, compared to 15 000 leva before.

Increasingly, banks have started asking loan applicants to have salaries wired into accounts with the respective lenders as a pre-condition for receiving loans.

UniCredit Bulbank added 1.75 percentage points to interest rates of its euro-denominated consumer loans. Municipal Bank raised the bottom rate on all of its local-currency and euro loans to 14 per cent from 12 per cent and hiked fees, including the one-off service fee. Similar increases were seen at the United Bulgarian Bank and MKB Unionbank.

Allianz Bank Bulgaria have stopped preferential consumer loan offers for public employees.

Mortgage loans followed the same trend as consumer loans, albeit at a slower pace. Moitepari.bg said that the mortgage segment was "sluggish" in February.

EIBank actually lowered the interest rates on its lev-denominated and euro-denominated products by 0.50 percentage points and 0.35 percentage points, respectively. Interest on ProCredit Bank’s mortgages in leva went down 0.65 percentage points because of fluctuations in the Sofibor, the reference rate at which Bulgarian banks lend to each other, but the bank has also set a minimum threshold of nine per cent for interest rates on mortgages.

Source: Dnevnik

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