Tag: retail banking

While the African banking market has seen withdrawal of global banks over the last 5 years, the opportunity for localised banking has seen the opposite, driven by the expansion of African banking groups into the continent, led mostly by South African, West African, and Northern African banks.

Two-thirds of South Africans expect the country’s banks to make a full transition to digital banking within five years, a report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in partnership with us, has found.

The customer satisfaction gap between South Africa’s banks is closing rapidly, with the digital acceleration brought about by the pandemic being a significant equaliser. Banks are under significant pressure to reinvent their customer value propositions and differentiators at a time when technology and digitisation are making them increasingly invisible to their customers - until things go wrong.

The banking group is hopeful that impairments will decline, and client activity will continue to improve as the year progresses. Nedbank believes the worst may be behind it after suffering a large decline in first-half earnings due to what is has billed as the Great Lockdown Crisis (GLC).

Digital disruption has clearly hit the banking industry hard across the globe. The first decade of the 21st century initiated enormous change in the way financial institutions operate and this has only accelerated over the years leading up to the current 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR).

The relentless drive towards digital banking is making banks ‘invisible’, leaving customers looking for more value, human engagement and diversity of transactional channels according to the South African Customer Satisfaction Index (SA-csi) for banking.

Nedbank says structural reforms aimed at stemming the current economic and fiscal deterioration in SA need to be implemented with greater urgency. Its call came as it reported muted growth in interim earnings and trimmed its full-year guidance due to weaker than expected economic growth this year.

While the bank’s West African-associate weighed on 2017 earnings, a turnaround last year helped mitigate challenging conditions at home. Nedbank has benefitted from a turnaround at its Ecobank Transnational International (ETI) associate as growth in its home market continues to stagnate.