The banks margin was the banks margin over the ECB and that was that.
Ah ok. So they could have used cash from other sources (deposits maybe) or other funding at a lower rate so there would be a further margin to the bank within the overall rate charged to the customer?The ECB rate was not the banks' cost of funding. So that was not that.
Brendan
If you have access to Irish Times archives, then in the property supplement every Friday they published "best buys" and this listed all the available rates from all the lenders that week.So a good way for a bank to manage market challenges such as competition & media pressure around rates was to somehow conflate an SVR & tracker product.
without the current knowledge of how valuable a tracker was, no one rate option would jump out at you as THE RATE to go for. -
the real advantage of a tracker was that you didn't have to wait a month or two for the banks to pass on rate cuts.