Singapore Retail Banking: Competitor Benchmarking 2021

GlobalData's Singapore Retail Banking: Competitor Benchmarking 2021 report discusses the following key findings in the report:

• Since 2019, cost-to-income ratios have marginally increased for Singaporean providers. This makes sense given the costs associated with innovation and technology that have developed over the years, as well as the extra costs faced during COVID-19.

• Top five players in Singapore have a combined market share of 82% for credit cards.

• Data from our 2021 Financial Services Consumer Survey shows that there is still a need for branches, with many respondents not yet feeling comfortable enough to become a full digital banking user.

• NIM (net interest margin) figures for 2020 show a decrease across players. For example, DBS recently reported a NIM of 1.45% in the second quarter of 2021, lower than 1.62% a year ago. For OCBC, NIM was reported at 1.56%, unchanged from the previous quarter and lower than the 1.76% for the first quarter of 2020.

• All major banks in Singapore have customer bases where the majority are in favor of alternative providers for a primary transaction account. Security is a big concern for Singaporean consumers; customers at four major banks have cited security as a reason for preferring alternative providers.

• Standard Chartered customers are generally very satisfied with the services on offer. Despite this, Standard Charter falls significantly short on cross-selling, with a large number of customers holding no additional products. This is likely driven by the bank’s low customer satisfaction for staff helpfulness and branch accessibility specifically.

• CIMB, despite scoring poorly for many metrics, has the highest satisfaction for easy-to-use digital banking. For competitive prices, UOB has a low satisfaction rate here and also scores lower than other banks for easy-to-understand products, meaning it is positioned similarly to POSB, whereby there are concerns around product satisfaction through different attributes.

• As the diagram above demonstrates, DBS has an unparalleled share of current accounts.

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