Fearful bank staff to fight on over strike
● Business lobby groups breathed a collective sigh of relief this week after a total shutdown of banking operations across SA hit the skids.
A labour court interdicted the strike on Thursday after an application by Business Unity SA.
But the South African Society of Banking Officials and the Congress of South African Trade Unions are not done just yet. The two organisations moved to appeal the decision that declared their protest unlawful.
At the centre of the dispute with the banking sector are looming job losses, retrenchments and high executive salaries. In addition to a moratorium on these, the unions are demanding clarity on how the fourth industrial revolution is likely to affect work prospects.
Traditional brick-and-mortar banks are under pressure as demand for digital services and competition from new digital start-ups such as Discovery Bank, TymeBank and Bank Zero take hold.
Harry Botha, banks and speciality finance analyst at Avior Capital, said a lot of bank transactions had moved to digital and banks would be hiring more staff for positions in IT and data science while front offices would have fewer staff.
“Banks’ results have shown that there is quite a strong shift towards digital transactions, partly I guess [because of] consumer behaviour and partly the banks encouraging it by making the in-branch transactions much more expensive, and obviously there’s a lot of competition in the digital space to keep transaction fees low,” Botha said.
This was likely to be a key theme over the next few years, he said.
Earlier this year, Standard Bank reportedly shut down 91 branches and retrenched 1,200 employees due to digitisation.
Standard Bank spokesperson Xolisa Vapi said the bank supports the right of unions to protest. “We are equally mindful of our responsibility to our clients to serve them in the ways they prefer, which are increasingly digital. In fact, 99% of our transactions in SA are already digital,” said Vapi.
Digital transactions grew 6% in the first half of 2019. In-person transactions fell by 15%, while the value of mobile banking transactions rose by 47%.
The trend has accelerated in the rest of the bank’s Africa region operations, where 92% of customers are making digital transactions. These digital channels increased by 23% in the first half of 2019.
Absa said the move towards digital services had been happening globally for some time and was one that all businesses must take into account to survive in the long term.
The bank has set its sights on being a digitally led organisation as part of the strategy and business model it introduced last year.
The result has been 269 staff taking early retirement and 672 redundancies. The restructuring has resulted in new opportunities and roles, and some staff are part of a three-month reassignment process to skill them for internal or external opportunities.
Capitec Bank has bucked the retrenchment trend. It is increasing its staff by more than 200 people this year and will open 17 new branches within six months.
Capitec CEO Gerrie Fourie said: “Our implementation of technology in the business has not posed a threat to jobs, instead it has helped us improve processes, freeing up our staff to help clients bank better.”
Capitec Bank’s interim results for the six months to end-August show that of its 12.6million active clients, 6.8-million are digital channel clients, which Fourie said possibly made Capitec the biggest digital bank in SA.
Deb Fuller, Nedbank group executive for human resources, said: “Over recent years we have seen changing client needs and behaviours influenced by digital technologies, making it necessary to adapt our product offerings, services delivery and engagement model for faster, more effective solutions delivered to clients.”
She said that this year Nedbank has two reorganisation processes in its retail and business banking divisions.
“Our approach is to ensure that retrenchments are an option of last resort.
“This is demonstrated by the low numbers of retrenched staff in recent years,” said Fuller.
Nedbank has had an average of 40 retrenchments a year over the past five years.