Why all banks are chasing affluent customers
· Citizen
The middle market has long ceased to be the primary battleground for the country’s major banks. The real battle is for affluent customers – and not just those who would typically use (and expect) private banking.
Even Capitec is getting in on the action. In the six months to August 2025, it saw 24% growth in customers earning more than R50 000 per month (against an 8% increase in its 25 million active base).
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Growth in the affluent segment continues to exceed that of the broader base across the big five banks.
Absa says the number of active clients in its affluent segment grew 6% last year, with those in private wealth banking up 7%. This is against its overall transactional customer base increasing by 3%.
FNB’s ‘Private’ segment (for those earning more than R750 000 a year) grew customer numbers by 8%, versus the 2% growth in its ‘Personal’ (mass/mid-market) for the six months to end-December.
Nedbank and Standard Bank haven’t segmented their customer bases for 2025, but there is little reason to doubt that growth is more robust at the top end.
Standard Bank market ‘snapshot’
Standard Bank has, for the first time, offered a more detailed picture of the two types of customers.
Across its operations in Africa, it has 15.1 million customers in the ‘personal’ segment. These are low- to middle-income people who span “early entrants into banking, to youth and [the] economically active middle class”.
In the ‘private’ segment, there are 1.5 million customers “from young professionals to high-net-worth individuals and families”.
The bulk of these bases is in South Africa, given that it has 12 million active retail clients in this market and 4.5 million north of us.
Affluent clients tend to hold many more of the bank’s products than those in the personal segment.
In South Africa, clients in the private segment have an average of eight products and solutions, spanning transactional accounts, savings, credit, insurance, home loans, vehicle finance and payments. For clients in the personal segment, this number is an average of three.
It uses additional means, including relationship bankers and financial advisors, to service these affluent clients, and this provides a useful sales channel.
Insights from FNB
Not only are affluent customers more ‘valuable’ from a transaction and products point of view, this client activity also drives deposit and advances growth – as evidenced by disclosure by FNB.
In the last six months of 2025, customers in the ‘Private’ segment grew deposits by 5% (2% for ‘Personal’), while advances increased by 8% (versus an 8% decline in the middle market).
In rand terms, the difference is astonishing.
Deposit growth in the Private segment was R17.8 billion; this accounted for 90% of retail deposit growth. When it comes to loans, this growth was R22.3 billion (versus a tightening of R6 billion in the Personal segment).
’10 times’ more valuable
Standard Bank says clients in the affluent and high-net-worth segment have a 10 times higher relative value than low- or middle-income ones.
This means the average revenue the bank is able to achieve per affluent client is 10 times that of a mass market one.
Overall, the uptake of products by clients at the higher end have lifted the bank’s client entrenchment score from 3.4 to 3.7 over the past year.
Key to keeping clients entrenched is its digital platforms. The bank says digital clients are “more engaged, more loyal and more profitable”.
Their product holding tends to be 1.7 times that of non-digital clients and revenue per client is 1.6 times higher.
Currently, 67% of its retail clients are digitally active. By 2028, it wants to grow this to over 70%.
This article was republished from Moneyweb. Read the original here.