Chinese Central Bank to Pay Interest on Centralised Customer Deposits of Payments Companies

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) have announced that it will pay interest on trillions of yuan in customers deposits that Chinese payments companies are required to hold with the central bank.

Since 14 January 2019 PBOC has required that all of Chi­na’s non-bank third party pay­ments providers place 100% of their cus­tomer de­posits at in­ter­est-free ac­counts with the central bank.

The move deprived payments providers of a highly lucrative earnings stream of billions of yuan in interest revenues from deposits that payments providers had previously placed with commercial banks.

PBOC has just announced that it will reverse the “no interest” policy it first implemented in 2017 when transfers of customer deposits commenced, by providing an annual interest rate of 0.35% to third party payments platforms.

Analysts say that while the move was expected, the rate is half that anticipated by the Chinese payments sector.

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