Where bank appetite sits, what rate movements mean for you, and what has changed this year.
Every bank has a published product range and an unpublished view on which sectors it currently wants more of. The second one changes through the year, moves with portfolio concentration and provisioning, and is the reason two banks can give opposite answers on the same file in the same month. Nobody advertises it, because it would amount to telling half the market not to bother applying.
What can be observed is the pattern in what comes back from submissions: which sectors are being asked for more security than last quarter, where turnaround times have lengthened, and which requests are being met with a counter-offer rather than a decline. That is not a published statistic and it is not a forecast. It is what a file-level view of the market looks like, and it is more useful for deciding where to apply than any rate table.
A change to the Overnight Policy Rate does not land on your facility the day it is announced. It moves the base rate a bank quotes on new lending, and it moves existing floating-rate facilities on the bank’s own timetable. A fixed-rate term loan may not move at all. Working out what a rate decision does to your repayments is arithmetic you can do yourself, and the guide here shows the working.
These three are living documents rather than finished articles. They are rewritten as the position changes, and each one carries the date it was last reviewed. Where a current figure has not been confirmed, the gap is marked rather than filled with a stale number.
None of it is a prediction. We do not forecast rates, we do not tell you whether to borrow now or wait, and we have no view worth having on where policy goes next. What is here is a description of the conditions applications are currently meeting, which is a different and more modest claim. Treat it as background for a decision you make on your own numbers.
What credit appetite is, why no bank publishes it, and where it sits sector by sector based on what comes back from our submissions.
How a Bank Negara rate decision reaches your facility, what it changes, what it does not, and how to work out the effect yourself.
The year’s changes to schemes, bank documentation, approval patterns and regulation, grouped by who made the change and what you can do about each.
If something here applies to your business and you want to know what it means in your case, ask. We will tell you what we think before you commit to anything, including when the answer is that you should wait.