Banking

Hundreds of thousands of customers bail on FNB

Staff Writer

 ·12 Oct 2015

The latest banking customer data shows which banks have been winning and losing in the battle for consumers in South Africa.

Notably, there has been a shift between Nedbank and FNB – with the latter losing its spot in third place to Nedbank, as banking customer numbers slipped.

In its full year report to June 2015, FirstRand reported a drop in total FNB banking customers to 7.1 million. This follows a big drop to 7.3 million customers in 2014 from 7.6 million in 2013.

The 2015 drop is due to the bank reorganizing its customer data – a process in which over 300,000 accounts in 2015 were reclassified as dormant.

2014’s drop was chalked up to the loss of government’s social grant tender, which resulted in the bank losing a big portion of mass-market customers.

In its interim results to June 2015, Nedbank reported its main banked retail clients were up 8% over the period, with total clients up 6% to 7.3 million.

This pushes the bank ahead of FNB to South Africa’s new number three.

Capitec also continued to grow, with its latest full year financial report showing it added 902,000 active clients over the past year ending in August 2015 – of which 576,000 are additional primary banking clients.

Active client numbers grew during the past six months to 6.7 million at the end of August 2015.

Standard Bank did not provide South African figures for June 2015, pointing to the full year 2014 report, in which local retail customers stood at 11.1 million.

Absa did provide and update in its interim report (to June 2015), however the figure was flat at 9.2 million customers in South Africa.

South African banking customers at June 2015

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