Singapore Retail Banking: Competitor Benchmarking 2024

This report benchmarks the largest retail banks in Singapore across a range of financial and customer satisfaction metrics. The report analyzes gains/losses in market share, depth of customer relationships, consumer pain points, and key metrics including Net Promoter Score, cross-selling, and digital satisfaction.

The Singapore retail banking market remains concentrated with low penetration by digital challengers, with Trust Bank and GXS Bank being the largest two such entrants. Despite this, local banks have lost share to international competitors such as Standard Chartered, HSBC, and Citibank. Increases in cost-to-income ratios across the market suggest inflationary pressures have outpaced efficiency savings and revenue growth. This demonstrates that the market is vulnerable to economic shocks, which may be more prevalent in the unstable geopolitical environment of the 2020s. Singapore has a disproportionately large mass affluent consumer population, which has led banks to focus on premium services such as wealth management and investment services. Deep relationships between banks and consumers have boosted the cross-selling rate and lengthened the duration of consumer tenure.

Scope

• The Singaporean retail banking market remains concentrated, with the four largest banks capturing 81% of consumers. International banks such as HSBC and Citibank have managed to gain market share from local banks in mortgages, loans, credit cards, and deposits, suggesting they are able to offer more attractive products.
• More than half the banks in the market experienced a rise in their cost-to-income ratio from 2018-23, suggesting that rising costs due to inflationary pressures have outpaced rises in income and efficiency gains.
• Singapore has a high proportion of mass affluent consumers, which is reflected in banks' high cross-selling rates, especially for high-value products such as premium accounts, investments, and insurance.

Reasons to Buy

• Develop an understanding of the composition of the Singapore retail banking market.
• Learn which banks are succeeding and which are failing across various metrics, ranging from profitability to Net Promoter Score.
• Identify the actionable steps that need to be taken by Singapore banks to address their biggest shortcomings.