MNB: central bank launches new tool to help compare banking fees

With the new tool, the MNB helps reduce banking costs for households and strengthens market competition between banks, as even for customers with the same payment habits, there can be up to tenfold differences between the annual transaction costs of account packages and related services, the central bank added.

The new publication makes the pricing of account packages more transparent for customers, simplifies the comparison of their costs, and thus supports customers in finding the cheapest services for them.

The MNB calculates the annual transaction costs of account packages for 7 customer types, so everyone can find the profile that most closely matches their payment habits and the account packages available to them in ascending order of cost. The publication contains the service packages currently available from all domestic banks, so customers can choose from more than 60 account packages for every payment habit.

Taking into account all fees paid, there are significant differences, up to tenfold, of tens of thousands of forints, between the annual payment costs of customers with the same payment habits.

According to the MNB, a significant part of customers still use expensive account packages, even though a full-fledged account package is now available for all customer types for a cost of a few thousand forints per year, which includes all essential services.