Consumer satisfaction with the big four banks has declined by a further 0.4 percentage points to 76.9 per cent in March, the second decline since February, according to the latest results of Roy Morgan Research’s monthly consumer bank satisfaction report.
Over the last two months satisfaction with the major banks has declined 0.9 percentage points, spurred on by the out-of-cycle home loan increases in February first initiated by the ANZ and followed up by the other major banks, Roy Morgan stated.
National Australia Bank (NAB) (77.5 per cent) now sits just ahead of ANZ (77.4 per cent), having fallen 1.7 percentage points over the past two months compared to ANZ’s 1.2 percentage point fall, the report showed.
The results also revealed that Westpac lost 0.8 percentage points while Commonwealth Bank (CBA) went down 0.6 percentage points.
As a result of the unpopular interest rate increases, satisfaction among home loan customers fell again across all major banks, with ANZ posting a 3.4 percentage point decrease, followed by Westpac (down 1.9 percentage points), NAB (down 1.3 percentage points) and CBA (down 0.8 percentage points).
The report also found that satisfaction among big four business customers continued to lag well behind that of personal customers, posting an average satisfaction level of 64.9 per cent.
"With over two million business bank customers across Australia, this poor performance must be having a negative impact on the personal customer satisfaction levels of the major banks," the report said.
Despite the fact that the big four banks showed an increase in customer satisfaction over a 12-month period, Roy Morgan’s results revealed that they were all well behind the customer satisfaction levels of their smaller competitors.
According to the survey, newly-created ‘mutual banks’ had an overall satisfaction level of 85.1 per cent.
Of the smaller authorised deposit-taking institutions, building societies lead with a score of 91.1 per cent followed by ING Direct (89.8 per cent), Bendigo and Adelaide Bank (89.4 per cent), credit unions (88.7 per cent) and ME Bank (86.4 per cent).
"It will be interesting to see if the superior performance by the smaller players can be translated into market share gains," Roy Morgan stated.
