Morgan Stanley | Our analyst expects the NII of Spanish banks to fall by 0.9% quarter-on-quarter on average due to seasonality, while the growth in deposits will offset lower rates in the short term. He believes that the guidance for 2024 will remain unchanged. Looking ahead to the numbers for 2025/26 and following the downgrade of the sector this week, he reduces the Euribor estimate from 2.5% to 2.25% on...

Santander, BBVA, and CaixaBank have been selected by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to participate in an initiative launched by the Basel-based institution to develop new cross-border payment methods using technologies similar to cryptocurrencies. Named the Agora Project, this BIS initiative aims to “explore how tokenization can strengthen cross-border payments,” according to the organization, which is considered the central bank of central banks, based in Basel, Switzerland. Specifically, the...

Aurelio Medel (5 Días)|Foreign business covers a fall of more than 30% in profit and credit in Spain since 2007, a historic year for the sector. Since then, 27,850 branches have closed and 115,000 jobs have fallen. The fanfare that occurred last week with the publication of banking results is the product of two contradictory exigencies. On the one hand, the Government wants to show that these are exaggerated profits...

Morgan Stanley: 100% of the sector has beaten NII so far, still a clear buy. Álvaro Serrano (analyst) highlights another quarter of solid results from European banks with 100% beating NII (rising rates and lower deposit betas) and contained credit risk. That said, the good results and the lack of growth in RWAs allowed banks to boost shareholder distributions with several of them (CABK, DBK, HSBC, BARC…) announcing new buyback...

Aristóbulo de Juan (Former Head of Banking Supervision. Bank of Spain) | The current obsession of bank regulators worldwide is capital, reinforcing capital. For good reasons: capital is fundamental. But, under the surface, this appears to be a nominal rather than effective fixation, at least judging by the questionable quality of some of the components of minimum capital required by regulators in Europe and elsewhere. Moreover, paradoxically, the regulatory and...

Caixabank | Spanish banks are strongly focused on the retail segment, which provides a more stable source of funding in the long-term. Stable deposits and operational deposits (those that have proven to be harder to withdraw) account for over 60% of total deposits for nearly all Spanish banks. This has contributed both to a positive evolution of profitability in a context of rising interest rates, as well as to a...