During a Knesset Parliamentary Committee discussion of legislation on regulating bank fees, officials from Israel’s banks for the first time said that they would be amenable to lowering the number of fees and amounts collected from the over 400 fees in force in the country’s banks. Moshe Perl, director general of the Israel Bankers Association, said that “we not only can ensure that customers here are treated like those in other countries, but they can be treated even better.”

The committee was discussing possible legislation that would require banks to ensure that fees in Israeli banks did not exceed an average of fees in other countries. The meeting was chaired by MK Moshe Kachlon (Likud). Kachlon said that if the banks were interested in heading off the legislation by reducing the fees voluntarily, they should return with specific information about exactly which fees would be reduced, and by how much.