I am a passionate collector of five kuna coins, so from time to time a certain amount accumulates. A year or two ago, I naively entered the branch of my home bank with forty ‘bear’ coins, wanting to exchange them for one or two paper bills of the same value – when the girl at the counter shocked me by stating that the fee for such an exchange is ten percent! Shocked, I asked her since when and where it says that, to which she showed me a document of about twenty pages titled 'Fees in Transactions with Individuals'. Indeed, in that document, there was a nicely listed item 'Fee for Coin Exchange', which is charged at ten percent of the total exchange amount.
Banks in Croatia generated a total of 15.9 billion kuna in operating income last year, which is an increase of 8.5 percent compared to the previous year. The majority of their income still comes from interest. Last year, they collected 10.7 billion kuna on that basis, five percent less than the previous year. The next income item is fees and commissions. Unlike interest income, revenues from this basis increased by a full 15 percent last year, amounting to 5.2 billion kuna.
Do you sometimes wonder how much you personally contributed to that? Or, even better, how much money you could save annually by choosing a bank that has the lowest fees and commissions for the services you use the most?
Comparison on the HNB Application
The differences in the amount of certain fees for the same services from bank to bank are not negligible. If you know exactly which services you use most frequently at the bank, with a little effort and a lot of digging through publicly available documents on bank fees, you can quite accurately calculate how much you pay your bank in fees annually and, more importantly, how much you would pay for those same services at another bank.
Since 2017, banks have been required, according to the Law on the Comparability of Fees, to provide consumers with an informative document on fees, but not for all, only for the most representative services related to payment accounts (account maintenance, online banking, national credit transfer in kuna, national credit transfer in euros, international credit transfer in euros, international credit transfer in a currency different from euros, incoming transfers from abroad, standing orders, SEPA direct debits, issuing credit cards, withdrawing cash with a debit card at an ATM, withdrawing cash with a credit card at an ATM, and overdrafts). Some banks, in addition to this legal obligation, list fees for all other services on their websites, while others only for some of them.
