BCP sets fixed rate mortgage for 300

Portuguese high-street bank BCP has fixed the monthly interest repayments on around 300 mortgages.

The decision was made on the back of a government measure that aims to protect families from rising interest rates by relaxing the Euribor rate.
BCP posted buoyant profits of €650.7 million for the three months ending in September, 7 times greater than the like-for-like period in 2022.
The bank’s financial margin increased 37% to €2.12Bn “benefitting from the normalisation of ECB interest rates.
BCP’s mortgage measure applies a 70% Euribor at six months rate that will enable households to lower their monthly repayments for 2 years.
The measure came into force on Thursday last week and the bank led by Miguel Maya has been setting mortgage repayments at a rate of 100 contracts a day since then.
The majority of requests for fixed mortgages were done via the bank’s home banking mobile phone app “to provide maximum priority to requests to adhere to the moratorium”, according to the bank.
In its latest results, profits on the bank’s products rose 35.3% to 2.8Bn, including bank service charges, which practically stabilised at €578.5 million.
The bank also enjoyed a positive impact from the sale of 80% of the capital of its insurance arm in Poland (Millennium Bank), which gave it an extraordinary revenue of €127 million. On the other hand, this year’s results also benefitted from the fact that in 2022 it factored in costs of €300 million from “credit breaks” in Poland.
“The bank’s growth in net income was largely due to the evolution of core income, which increased 27.2% from the €2.1Bn posted for the first nine months in 2022, totalling €2.69Bn in the same period in the current year.
“The performance of core income mainly reflects the 37.0% (€571.6 million) growth recorded in net interest income, with net commissions showing a slight increase of 0.8% (to €578.5 million) for the period”, states the bank in its three-quarterly results.