Bank charges: double sentence for the most fragile

Bruno Le Mayor says he wants to cap bank charges. "Incidents" cost 300 euros per year to customers in difficulty.
  

Being exposed is expensive. And have even more payment incidents. At BNP Paribas or Société Générale, for example the rejection for insufficient balance of a levy or an automatic transfer of more than 20 euros will cost you 20 euros of costs. Penalties are similar in the Crédit Agricole, Crédit Mutuel, Caisses d'Epargne or Banques Populaires networks, even if their rates vary according to the region.

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For an NSF check, it's more expensive. The bank sends you first a letter of warning for debit account (20 euros to BNP Paribas), or to invite you to regularize (15 euros to Société Générale). If the unpaid check remains officially rejected, both banks charge 50 euros (30 euros for an unpaid check less than 50 euros). You are then registered on the Central Bank Check File (FCC) of the Banque de France and banned from checkbook, causing a new notification fee of 33.50 euros at BNP Paribas.

Agios and incident expenses at nearly 300 euros a year

The pinnacle is reached with third-party notification fees, or ATD in bankers' jargon. When the Treasury asks your bank to enter in your account the amount of your unpaid taxes or fines, whether your balance is insufficient or not, the ATD is billed 130 euros by BNP Paribas and 133.20 euros by Société Générale.

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You will add to this intervention fees on each "operation resulting in an irregular operation of the account", capped at 8 euros per transaction within a limit of 80 euros per month, or 4 euros per transaction within a limit of 20 per month if you are considered fragile, when this provision of the banking law of 26 July 2013 is respected.

In the end, the cost of agios and incident costs would rise to nearly 300 euros per year (296 specifically) for customers in difficulty, according to a survey conducted by 60 million consumers with the National Union of Family Associations (Unaf). Four to six million people would be affected every month by bank incident charges.

Costs above the legal ceiling

However, finding yourself in the open, or even over-indebted, does not only happen to the poor, or to the cicadas suffering from buying fever during sales. Victim of a fraud on his credit card, as millions of French were able to suffer without any negligence, a driver has been charged 355.88 euros in fees, in addition to the sum concocted, that Crédit Mutuel Nord Europe (CMNE) refused to repay, in defiance of its obligation to do so under Articles L133-18 and following of the Monetary and Financial Code. "The judgment of May 20, 2015, condemning the bank to repay the fraud and costs, stressed on this occasion that they were higher than the legal ceiling set by Article R312-4-1 of the Monetary and Financial Code," says Master Hélène Feron-Poloni, who defended this client. "Apart from this type of case, we regularly see savers in all conditions strangled by over-indebtedness and bank charges for incidents following disastrous credit investments, particularly in real estate or life insurance. risk, "says lawyer Lecoq-Vallon & Feron-Poloni.

For these customers, bank charges are a nightmare. "Out of 120 cases, randomly selected from 2,600 clients in financial difficulty identified by our partners, bank fees reach an average of 124 euros per month, 72% of which are related to incidents," says Maxime Pekkip, prevention manager at the Cresus badociation. , which fights against the over-indebtedness, and member of the Observatory of banking inclusion (OIB).

Ineffective measures?

The Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire said recently to want to discuss with badociations and banks a "real effective ceiling of bank charges for modest households". Provisions to this effect would be included in the poverty plan.

But some players like the Cresus badociation fear that the goal is missing. The mechanisms to protect the poorest are not new, and their successes remain uneven. In case of seizure on the account of an individual for example, Article L162-2 of the Monetary Code created by the ordinance of 19 December 2011, obliges the bank to leave him an elusive bank balance (SBI) equivalent to the RSA ( active solidarity income) currently set at 550.93 euros. "But the law has nothing planned for overdraft accounts, so the banks charge them the costs of notice to third holder even when they reject the seizure for negative balance," denounces Maxime Pekkip.

The capping of fees and the provision of specific basic banking services for fragile clients, created by the law of July 26, 2013 (Article L312-1-3 of the Monetary Code) are also inefficient, as the criteria for fragility are set by the banks. "Some consider that it is necessary to earn less than 1200 euros to be fragile, while the customers in difficulty in our sample had an average salary of 3000 euros, but a remainder to live of 211 euros once paid their monthly installments of credit and their fixed charges (rent, energy …), even before the puncture of 124 euros of bank fees ", says Maxime Pekkip.

Result, barely 10% of 3.6 million people in situations of financial fragility benefit from these rates and specific ceilings, according to the Observatory of banking inclusion. Rather than capping, Cresus calls for better prevention and a more relevant understanding of financial difficulties, including an automatic retrocession of bank charges punctured the three months preceding the request of a client considering himself in financial difficulty. A wish pile?