Interest paid at maturity guidance for applicationFrequency in BankingProductDepositRate

[anzbankau]

Description

Fixed term deposit products such as term deposits may have the interest payment paid at the end of the term (i.e., 'at maturity') or periodically e.g., monthly (as a cash flow or to benefit from compounding). Three usage patterns have been observed to present this information in the applicationFrequency property in BankingProductDepositRate:

1. null or excluded - meaning Not Applicable (in contrast to Unknown)
2. Matching the term e.g. 'P6M' for a 6 month term
3. Exceeding the term of a range e.g. 'P1Y' for a 6-7 month term

Note: Another approach is to match the maximum term e.g. 'P7M' for a 6-7 month term.

Proposal

1. null or excluded

Rationale

1. null is commonly used in computer systems to indicate the value is Unknown or Not Applicable. Excluding the property is equivalent to null, as per the Payload Conventions.
2. The property name applicationFrequency implies the interest rate is applied more than once during the term of the deposit, so it's not applicable to interest paid only at maturity
3. Providing the value of the additionalValue property (meaning 'The period of time fixed' for depositRateType of 'FIXED') as the value for applicationFrequency to align the single payment at maturity is redundant information
4. BankingProductRateTierV3, the object in the tiers[] property permits the term to be specified as a range (e.g., 6-7 months) to allow customers to align the cash flow with their requirements. The applicationFrequency property is elementary so a range can't be provided to align with the term - either in Get Product Detail or Get Account Detail.

Reference

Zendesk ticket 1960 listed in Q&A section of ACCC & DSB | CDR Implementation Call Agenda & Meeting Notes | 1st of June 2023 and discussed in that call.

Area Affected

Schema:

• BankingProductDepositRate

This schema is incorporated in endpoints:

• Get Product Detail
• Get Account Detail

Change Proposed

Additional sentence appended to the description of applicationFrequency to clarify its usage:

Before:

The period after which the calculated amount(s) (see calculationFrequency) are 'applied' (i.e. debited or credited) to the account. Formatted according to ISO 8601 Durations (excludes recurrence syntax)

After (following style in standards)

The period after which the calculated amount(s) (see calculationFrequency) are 'applied' (i.e. debited or credited) to the account. Formatted according to ISO 8601 Durations (excludes recurrence syntax). If absent for a fixed-term deposit it indicates the calculated amount(s) are only applied at the end of the term i.e., at maturity.

Note: Bolding is only to highlight the additional text.