What South Africans really think about Absa, Nedbank, FNB, Standard Bank and Capitec
BrandsEye has released its 2019 South African Banking Sentiment Index, revealing which retail banks South Africans love and hate the most.
The index is based on an analysis of 1.9 million social media posts about South Africa’s largest banks across various platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
It also included an analysis of 68,500 posts about the new entrants, Bank Zero, Discovery Bank and Tyme.
BrandsEye uses topic analyses to gauge the sentiment of posts (either positive or negative), across 70 topics, and seven broad categories, including reputation, customer service, pricing and customer retention.
The net index score is determined by subtracting negative sentiment from positive sentiment.
Nedbank had the highest Net Sentiment for 2019. Capitec placed second and is the only bank to continuously maintain a positive Net Sentiment Score over multiple years.
Absa placed third, with a five-point decline from 2018, while Standard Bank placed fourth continuing its 3-year decline in sentiment (23 percentage points since 2017).
FNB had the largest decline in Net Sentiment of -27 points and had the lowest overall net Sentiment.
BrandsEye explained that Nedbank’s rise was driven by its successful corporate social investment initiatives. It added that the partnership with Global Citizen significantly improved the bank’s overall performance.
By comparison, Capitec had the best customer experience performance.
“This suggests that consumers still perceive Capitec to have the best operational performance,” it said.
“FNB was impacted by several reputational events throughout the year, which led to it scoring the lowest net sentiment.
“Standard Bank performed poorly across both reputational and operational measures – having had the worst customer experience sentiment and the second worse reputational sentiment.”
Absa, FNB and Standard Bank were implicated in several ethics-related issues that negatively impacted their sentiment, namely:
- Allegations by Emerald van Zyl of discrimination against black clients;
- The Bankorp bailout case and investigations into the Public Protector’s personal bank account;
- Allegations of historical involvement in rand fixing by Absa;
- FNB’s “free money” incident;
- The conversation about retrenchments and branch closures in the industry.
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