Bank Of Ireland Blames Funding Costs For Customer Rate Rises DUBLIN (Dow Jones)--Bank of Ireland (BIR.DB) on Friday said higher funding costs and recent rate increases by the European Central Bank left it no choice but to increase the rates it charges most of its home-loan, business and credit-card customers. The bank is the only Irish lender to have escaped outright government control. It attracted a EUR1.1 billion investment in its stock from a group of outside investors, including Canada's Fairfax Financial Holdings (FFH.T), despite Ireland's deep banking crisis. However, it remains loss-making, a legacy of reckless lending to property developers during boom times. Bank of Ireland, like other lenders, required billions of euro in government aid and continues to rely on huge amounts of short term loans from the European Central Bank to keep its doors open. Bank of Ireland said it will increase its standard variable rates by half a percentage point for home loan borrowers to 3.99%, and to 4.14% for customers of its ICS Building Society unit. It will increase variable rates for buy-to-let residential borrowers, also by 0.5 percentage point, it said. The lender said it will increase the costs of its credit cards by 0.5 percentage point; increase personal loan rates by 0.25 percentage point; and increase charges on its personal overdrafts by 0.5 percentage point. Business customers also face increases of 0.5 percentage point on loan and overdraft rates, it said. "We have delayed passing on both the April and July ECB rate increases up to this point," the bank said in a statement. "However, the price at which we provide lending facilities must reflect the cost of funding those facilities and we have no option other than to increase our rates to reflect the two ECB rate increases." -By Eamon Quinn, Dow Jones Newswires; +353 1 676 2189; eamon.quinn@dowjones.com Order free Annual Report for Bank of Ireland Visit http://djnewswires.ar.wilink.com/?link=IRE or call 1-888-301-0513 |