You’ll be hardpressed to meet an adult South African who doesn’t have at least one gripe about their bank.

As regular readers of this site will know, Seth had more than a few gripes about Nedbank, which is why he ended up ditching them for FNB.

Based on the results of BrandsEye’s 2019 South African Banking Sentiment Index, there’s a fair amount of switching going on between banks, which you can tell by analysing people’s social media posts.

Folks really do love a bank rant.

BrandsEye looked at close to two million posts between September 2018 to August 2019, which were related to our banking Big Five – Absa, Capitec, FNB, Nedbank and Standard Bank.

Over to BusinessTech for the results:

According to BrandsEye, across the industry, around 7.7% of tracked conversations were around cancelling bank accounts.

FNB had the highest volume of cancellation conversation at 2.3 points above the industry average (10%)…

BusinessTech

After FNB, Absa and Standard Bank face the next highest risk of losing customers, BrandsEye said.

Standard Bank had the highest proportion of customers threatening to leave their bank while citing other banks. This suggests that Standard Bank clients may be at greater risk of churning, given that other options are being directly considered in cancellation threats, the group said.

Given how much people love a moan, it’s rather surprising to find that banks only responded to 68% of posts threatening to cancel an account. Even then, the average response time was all of 25 hours.

With FNB featuring top amongst the ‘cancel conversations’, you’d be justified in wondering why they weren’t mentioned in the headline.

Well, when people threaten to jump ship on their existing bank, it’s FNB and Capitec that are mentioned most often as the preferred alternative.

Absa, Standard Bank and Nedbank customers are all more likely to move to FNB, and then Capitec, the data showed.

Capitec customers who leave are also more likely to move to FNB, while FNB customers who leave are most likely to move to Capitec.

None of the other banks saw potential moves at rates matching these two groups.

So Capitec and FNB are passing customers back and forward, and the other banks are just losing out to these two.

Let’s just hope that increased competition leads to better products and cheaper fees, which is what we’re all after at the end of the day.

[source:businesstech]