BIZ BUZZ: Salmon Bank retires 8.88-percent interest rate on deposits
Salmon Bank has stopped offering its eyebrow-raising 8.88-percent interest on deposit accounts and has ratcheted this down to 6.5 percent. Still, the rural bank touts the yield as a benchmark for deposits.
Co-founder and chair Raffy Montemayor says this still beats other banks which at best offer 5 percent or as little as 1.5 percent.
But wait, there’s more. The 6.5 percent is just the nominal rate as the effective annual rate is 7.02 percent.
“Your P1 million earns P70,200 in one year with Salomon—more than twice what traditional banks pay,” Montemayor says.
Shortly after Taguig City-based Salmon Group secured regulator approval of its acquisition of a majority stake in Rural Bank of Sta. Rosa (in Laguna), they started in February 2024 to offer the 8.88-percent interest on deposits. But this stopped last month—September—amid an environment of receding interest rates.
Montemayor says that at the end of the first quarter of 2024, deposits totaled at P372.9 million. At the end of the third quarter of 2025, this has reached P1.77 billion—ballooning by 375 percent.
Pavel Federov, one of two other co-founders (George Chesakov), says that starting this month, new customers that will open deposit accounts will get an interest rate of 6.5 percent.
“We live in a very dynamic world and the BSP (Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas has brought down (its benchmark) interest rate by 75 basis points over the last three quarters,” Fedorov.
He says that, in that context, they had to bring down their interest rate also.
Still, deposit accounts that were opened before this month would enjoy 8.88 percent.
“They [those depositors] are really lucky,” Fedorov says.
