To succeed in today’s banking environment, bank executives need to understand their customers: their preferences, their channel usage, their needs and their satisfaction.

That is why we talked with more than 33,000 retail banking customers spread across 18 different African markets. We asked them what was important to them in a banking relationship. We asked them what channels they currently use and what channels they would like to use. And we asked them how their current banks compared to their expectations.

The data we collected from our conversations reflect the opinions of real banking customers. As such, they reflect only the perceptions of customers and – as a result – they may not always be fair. Perceptions are, by definition, subjective. To be clear: the data reported in this survey does not reflect the opinions of KPMG member firms. Rather, it illustrates the feelings and experiences of customers based on the service they received at their particular banks.

For this survey, we talked with retail banking customers across 18 sub-Saharan countries in Africa. With the exception of Nigeria (where response rates were higher than average) we collected data from at least 650 individual banking ‘relationships’ in each market we surveyed. A minimum number of respondents were required for each bank in the survey to ensure that results reflected the opinion of a representative customer group.