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Stuttgart (dpa / lsw) - More and more customers of the savings banks in the southwest are unable to repay their loans as agreed in view of the economic turmoil in the corona pandemic.
Since the beginning of the crisis, around 60,000 private and corporate customers have suspended their repayment installments at one of the 50 savings banks in the state for at least three and sometimes up to nine months, the Baden-Württemberg savings bank association announced in Stuttgart on Tuesday.
In this context, the houses would have deferred these customers a sum of 1.4 billion euros with a credit volume of a good 12 billion euros.
"That is a top value that we have never had in the last few decades," said Association President Peter Schneider.
It happens again and again that individual people or companies get into difficulties with loan repayments - but never to such a large extent within a year.
However, this does not cause problems for the financial institutions, especially since only a small number of loan agreements are still affected by deferrals: In total, the savings banks in Baden-Württemberg issued around 1.3 million loans with a volume of over 143 billion euros in 2020 - that was 6.8 billion euros more than in the previous year.
The savings banks continue to suffer primarily from the European Central Bank's low interest rate policy.
As a result, net interest income - traditionally the most important source of income for the savings banks - continued to decline.
And this despite a sharp rise in deposits from private and corporate customers by 7.9 percent to a total value of 159 billion euros.
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Because parking the funds is also increasingly costing the savings banks money, more and more financial institutions are trying to gain air by introducing penalty interest for individual customer groups.
The bottom line was that the Südwest-Sparkassen earned around 854 million euros last year, 150 million less than in 2019.
Schneider emphasized that despite all the problems, the corona crisis had not yet brought "a dramatic slump" for the savings banks.
For the current year, however, it is expected that even more customers will experience payment difficulties.
"The situation of some business customers, some of whom had to close for almost six months in the past twelve months or were unable to operate, is becoming more dramatic every day."
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210209-99-366761 / 2