New report finds Saudi banks fail to meet customer expectations of digital experience

New report finds Saudi banks fail to meet customer expectations of digital experience

Saudi Arabia’s digital services market has long been lauded as the largest in the MENA region, with annual spend on digital transformation reaching SR12 billion ($3.19 billion) a year. For Saudi banking customers, however, the digital experience still leaves much to be desired.

This is according to the 2022 Saudi Banking Sentiment Index, conducted by leading social data business DataEQ, which reveals digital experience to be one of the most negatively-spoken-about topics among Saudi banking customers on social media. Complaints around digital experience mostly occur in periods when consumers are likely to transact more, like month-end.

Presenting the Index results in Riyadh at the recent Future Banks Summit, DataEQ’s Chief Executive Officer, Nic Ray, explained that system downtime, coupled with a lack of communication, frustrates consumers during these high-demand periods. “When drilling down into these negative posts, we found that frustration with the banking digital experience is often because of system outages or app downtime, which typically leaves consumers unable to complete critical banking transactions.

“This may suggest that there are constraints related to transaction capacity across some of the banks,” Ray noted.

Social sentiment towards Saudi banks is negative overall

The Saudi Banking Sentiment Index tracked close to 700 000 Twitter posts about five