RateWatch deposit-rate surveys (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

RateWatch is a paid licensed product (S&P Global Market Intelligence), so it carries no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session. Treat it as unverified until someone exercises it through a licensed S&P Global / RateWatch subscription. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

RateWatch surveys the posted deposit and CD rates of U.S. bank and credit union branches, at the branch level and weekly frequency, across products (savings, money market, certificates of deposit by term and balance tier). It is the standard source for the price of deposits in the cross-section of branches, used to study deposit competition, rate-setting, and the deposits channel. A paper we distill uses it: Martin, Puri & Ufier use RateWatch 12-month CD rate spreads to show that large banks under regulatory enforcement raise deposit rates (paying on average roughly 75 basis points above the FDIC national average, near the regulatory rate cap) to attract insured term deposits.

• Cost: licensed, subscription. No free tier.
• Vendor: S&P Global Market Intelligence (RateWatch).
• Coverage: branch-level posted deposit and CD rates for U.S. depository institutions, weekly, by product and balance tier; broad branch coverage with a long weekly history.

Access (when licensed)

• Through an S&P Global / RateWatch subscription. Extracts are obtained under a RateWatch licence (directly or through S&P Global Market Intelligence); some institutions reach it via a market-data agreement.
• Keyed by branch, product, and week. A rate record is a posted rate for a product (for example a 12-month CD at a balance tier) at a branch in a survey week; aggregate to bank level with branch weights when you need an institution-level rate.
• No credential is run here. Keep any access credentials in .env, never hard-coded.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• Posted rates, not paid rates. RateWatch records the rate a branch advertises, not the average rate actually paid on the existing deposit book; the posted rate leads and overstates marginal cost relative to the realized interest expense in Call Reports. Match the concept to your question and do not equate the two.
• Product and balance tier must be fixed. Deposit rates vary sharply by product (savings versus CD), CD term, and balance tier; comparing across branches requires holding the product and tier constant (the citing paper fixes on the 12-month CD). Specify the product.
• Branch versus institution aggregation. A bank has many branches that may post different rates; rolling up to a bank-level rate needs a weighting choice (deposit-weighted, simple, rate-setter branch). State the aggregation.
• Rate-setter and follower structure. RateWatch identifies rate-setting branches whose rates other branches mirror; treating every branch as an independent observation overstates the effective sample size. Account for the rate-setter design.
• Linking to bank financials. Joining branch rates to bank-level Call Report data (see Call Reports) requires mapping branch to RSSD / institution across mergers and branch sales; the join has known mismatches around acquisition events. Verify the link.

Citation

Cite the vendor and product, e.g.: RateWatch (S&P Global Market Intelligence), accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State the deposit product and balance tier, the branch-to- bank aggregation, and the weekly date range.