News conference on new 20-franc note  Berne, 10 May 2017 Fritz Zurbrügg  Introductory remarks by Fritz Zurbrügg  Ladies and gentlemen It is a pleasure to welcome you to our news conference. My colleague Thomas Wiedmer and I are delighted to present the Swiss National Bank’s new 20-franc note to you today. We showed you what it looks like just a few minutes ago – I hope you like it. Personally, I really like the way it has turned out, and I know that both of my colleagues on the Governing Board are also very pleased with the result. I shall start with a brief review of our experiences with the ninth banknote series so far; the 50-franc note – the first denomination in the new series to be released – entered circulation over a year ago. I shall then make some observations about the theme and design of the 20franc note, before handing over to Thomas Wiedmer, who will go through the security features and present the accompanying information material. We presented the new 50-franc note in April 2016 and, as expected, it attracted a great deal of public interest. Not only had it been 20 years since the last banknote series was released, but the new notes also contained features that clearly set them apart from earlier series. For starters, they feel different due to the new substrate. Furthermore, an entirely new design approach was adopted.
Given the elevated level of prices relative to earnings at the start of the decade and the further sharp increase in the middle of the decade, constraints on the availability of credit, both lender-imposed and regulatory, are likely to have held back activity. Building a sufficient deposit is one of the biggest constraints facing most first-time buyers. Only 19% of renters across the UK have sufficient savings to afford a 5% deposit on the median first-time property in their region. In London and the South and East, high house prices relative to earnings mean that potential first-time buyers have to save even larger deposits in order to be able to afford their mortgages. For regions outside London and the South and East, first-time buyers’ deposits are typically 48% of their incomes. In London and across regions in the South and East on average, this is 121% and 80% respectively. 13  Since June 2014, the FPC has recommended a limit of 15% on the proportion of new mortgages extended at or above 4.5 times a borrower’s income. Building on the FCA’s rules, the FPC has also recommended that lenders assess whether borrowers could meet their mortgage payments if their mortgage interest rate switched to the contractual reversion rate and increased by 3 percentage points. 14  The FPC published its most recent review of the housing tools in the December 2019 Financial Stability Report.