DURBAN - BrandsEye has published their annual South African Banking Sentiment Index which shows Capitec Bank as the top ranking bank by net sentiment.
First National Bank made significant improvements on their 2017 net sentiment results while Standard bank replaced Absa as the lowest rated bank.
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BrandsEye retrieves 1720810 public social media posts about South African banks between 1 September 2017 and 31 August 2018. 521326, a random sample of these posts, were assessed for sentiment by humans on the BrandsEye's Crowd platform. This allows for a proper understanding of the consumer sentiment and certain issues that driving that statement.
The BrandsEye index looks at the major issues that impact sentiment amongst consumers as well as the reasons consumers left or threatened to leave their banks.
In terms of digital banking, FNB surpassed competitor banks overall, a trend that is mostly driven by their innovations over the year. These innovations include opening a bank account with a selfie to biometric ATMs and offering passport biometric services in branches.
Standard Bank had the lowest net sentiment in terms of digital themes at -72.7 percent. There were complaints about the app and there were disruptions on the digital platform.
Threats to cancel services
Over 30 000 consumers spoke about leaving their bank on social media. Standard Bank and Nedbank customers were the most frequent in their threats to leave the bank
Some of the reasons that the customers threatened to leave their banks include poor turnaround times, billing of payments and telephonic interactions amongst others.