David Le Page Besides cheque fraud, the other major reason offered by South African banks for high bank charges is an overly small market, or as they put it, “inadequate volumes to justify the infrastructure involved”.
The banking industry explains its quandary as follows. As more banks have appeared in the country, the major retail banks have found themselves forced to reduce bank charges to high-income customers in order to compete. Increased IT costs (caused by a depreciating rand) and increased cash handling costs (caused by appreciating cash heists) have added to their woes. So they stopped cross-subsidisation of their customers and set about charging each market segment what it actually costs to run their accounts. They hasten to reassure customers that if they develop savings habits, their banking will cost them less. FNB, for example, levies no charges on a current account with a standing R5 000 balance. But this generosity is disingenuous. That R5E000 will earn just 2,5%, saving the thrifty consumer on bank charges but costing them in missed opportunities to earn more interest. Of course, none of this would apply were the volumes of customers less “inadequate”, as the Banking Council puts it. For a couple of years now, the industry has been protesting that it’s caught between a rock and a hard place; that government simultaneously wants it to be internationally competitive and provide banking services to the low-income market. The carefully laid out argument made by the Banking Council to the parliamentary porfolio committee on trade and industry was, in summary, that because micro-loans cost as much as bigger loans to administer, the micro-loan business is not good business.
According to the Banking Council’s 1999 annual report, released last week, “the portfolio committee accepted the commercial logic of the banks’ position”. Strangely enough, the chair of the committee, the African National Congress’s Dr Rob Davies, is hesitant to embrace the council’s version of events, saying “accepted” is perhaps too strong a word for the committee’s reaction. He has a number of reservations about the way the big banks conduct their business, saying of them that “there is an extraordinarily high level of risk aversion”.
That risk aversion, according to testimony heard by the committee, amounts in practice to racism (Davies’s word). Blacks are kept at arms length and are often treated worse than their white counterparts, even at the level of medium-sized business. Davies points out that complaints against the banks have been taken to the Human Rights Commission, and he fully expects them to be hauled regularly into the equality courts, once those institutions have been founded. Asked whether the big banks are perhaps just trying to preserve the interests of their shareholders, Davies has an interesting reply: “Perhaps they’re not operating with the interests of shareholders in mind.” If Davies just suspects that the big banks are missing a massive opportunity to develop new markets, Investec’s Piet Viljoen is in no doubt whatsoever. Speaking as an investment expert, and not as a representative of Investec the bank, Viljoen is adamant that shareholders need to press the big banks to get into the markets they are so convinced they should avoid.
“Banks such as African Bank have shown that you can operate profitably in the low- income market. It’s a matter of running a low-cost operation and getting to know the client,” he says.”If you limit yourself to the top 10% [of the market],” your growth constraints kick in quickly. Viljoen believes the banks have found it difficult to expand their thinking beyond the branch-based business model. He points out that African Bank has often used caravans as infrastructure, and that its representatives operate almost as door-to- door sales people. He believes African Bank’s joint venture with Standard Bank and Nedcor’s People’s Bank are examples of a slow shift in thinking.
If Davies and Viljoen are correct, the dinosaurs of South African banking are not only costing their shareholders in lost dividends, but their customers in unnecessarily high banking charges and frustrating service levels. The symptoms are not questioned by the Banking Council: “An unquestioned fact is that over the last few years bank charges have gone up significantly while many service standards have declined.” But the remedy has yet to be properly swallowed.