Pricing Wealth deposits can be tricky. You want to acknowledge and reward clients who have large relationships across deposits, lending and investments—especially those who include business with personal—but at what cost? Wealth deposit rates aren’t advertised widely, and even when published, they can tell an incomplete story at best. So it’s hard to know when your pricing is out of step with the market.
In 2022, when the Fed was off to the races with rate hikes, firms held their published rates for Wealth savings/MMS near the historic low and used exception pricing on only about 20% of balances. Even as the Fed topped out at 5.5%, in April 2024, average published rates were still a measly 1.43%. But by then nearly 80% of Wealth savings/MMS balances were exception priced—averaging 318 bp more than published rates on new balances and 211 bp more for portfolio balances (see chart). That’s according to Curinos’ Wealth Deposit Analyzer, the industry’s sole source for revealing actual account-level data on Wealth deposit rates.
Many had hoped that last year’s Fed cuts would prompt a swift decline in exception pricing and a return to tier-based pricing and published rates that could be trusted. A yawning gap, however, persists: published rates remain low, at 1.22%, while acquisition rates are 226 bp more than published rates and portfolio rates are 177 bp more.
The upshot? Even though slightly fewer of today’s balances are exception priced, providers hewing to published rates to justify their pricing strategy are risking lower inflows and elevated runoff.
APY | Wealth Savings | Apr ‘22 – Mar ‘25
Source(s): Curinos Wealth Deposit Analyzer, Curinos Standard Rate Data | Note(s): Simple averages displayed | Page displays all data available at time of production and bank consortium may differ from that of Wealth Deposit Analyzer tool
