Trending Financial News 27 June

UBank cuts savings account rates

UBank, a long-time market leader in the at-call savings market, has slashed interest rates on its USaver accounts.

The USaver base rate is being cut, effective today, by 0.27 per centage points from 1.81 per cent to 1.54 per cent. The maximum bonus rate, including the bonus of 1.06 per cent, is now 2.60 per cent, down from 2.87 per cent.

To get the bonus, savers must also have a UBank Ultra transaction account. UBank has also cut term deposit rates across the board by 0.10 percentage points.

ANZ cuts savings account rates

ANZ Bank has cut savings account bonus rates and introductory rates by 0.20 percentage points. ANZ is the last of the big four banks to announce cuts to savings rates.

The ANZ Progress Saver rate is down 0.20 percentage points to 2.2 per cent. To get this rate savers need to deposit a minimum of $10 a month and make no withdrawals.

ANZ Bank has cut the three-month intro rate on its Online Saver account by 0.20 percentage points to 2.1 per cent. The base rate is now 0.30 per cent.

Banks may not pass on next RBA cut

The Reserve Bank is widely expected to cut the official Australian cash interest rate again next week by 0.25 percentage points to 1.0 per cent.

However, banks and other lenders are extremely unlikely to pass on the full RBA rate cut according to CoreLogic’s senior researcher, Cameron Kusher.

Kusher says banks are caught between low mortgage rates and low savings rates.

Financial markets have priced in an 80 per cent chance of a rate cut by the RBA in July. Commonwealth Bank and National Australia Bank were the only two out of the big four to pass on the RBA’s full 0.25-percentage-point cut in June.

Aussie banks targeted by scammers

Australians and Aussie banks are increasingly the target of global fraudsters and scammers according to the KPMG Global Banking Fraud Survey.

“We are seeing a disproportionately high volume of scam attempts on Australians,” said KPMG’s Natalie Faulkner, “there were 177,000 scam reports here last year.”

Those 177,000 scams cost Aussies almost half a billion dollars in total.

Natalie Faulkner said there were around 85,000 scam reports in the US and UK, despite those countries have far larger populations than Australia.

“Many scam victims tend to be the elderly or socially isolated,” said Natalie Faulkner.