Sustainability is about ensuring financial prosperity and stability for our investors and staff, integrating social and environmental responsibility for our local communities and the countries in which we operate, and remaining relevant and accessible to our clients

Our clients

Pricing

Since early 2005, Nedbank Group has been working on improving its competitiveness in what it experiences as a highly competitive market.

The group’s commitment to affordable banking for all South Africans is demonstrated through the number of initiatives undertaken over the past few years, but particularly in 2006:

Nedbank has not increased bank charges since 2004.
Nedbank’s entry-level account, Transactor, launched in November 2005, is the best value-for-money transaction account in its category.
Specific price reductions on penalty fee items were implemented in March 2006.
Pricing reductions introduced during Nedbank’s annual pricing review, effective 1 July 2006, allow individual Nedbank clients to save an average of over 13% on their monthly banking fees.
The Nedbank Everyday Account offers a bundle of transactions for a fixed fee of R85 per month.
The October 2006 launch of free transactional banking for up to two years for new franchise or startup businesses.
A recent study of entry-level bank accounts by Finmark and research firm Infochoice shows that Nedbank’s NedSave (for under-eighteens) and Dezign Save youth accounts (for 18-to-24-year olds) are the cheapest options available.
Nedbank has reduced the fees on its Mzansi Account three times during 2006. Since 2004 Nedbank has attracted 475 000 clients to its Mzansi Account and the bank’s internal research indicates that at least 85 percent of these did not previously have a bank account.

THE COMPETITION COMMISSION’S INQUIRY INTO BANK PRICING

Nedbank Group believes that healthy and fair competition across all industries is an essential part of South Africa’s economic growth and sustainability. Fairness, openness and transparency are pursued in all the group’s dealings. For this reason Nedbank Group has given the Competition Commission its full support for the inquiry launched into particular aspects of competition in retail banking and the National Payments System (NPS).

The inquiry was predicated on the findings of the Competitiveness in South African Banking Report (the Falkena Report, 2004) and the NPS and Competition in the Banking Sector (The FEASibility Report, 2006) which, when coupled with increasing negative public sentiment in respect of bank charges, prompted the commission to launch the inquiry.

Nedbank Group’s views on the key inquiry issues

Nedbank Group publicly welcomed the inquiry from the outset, viewing it not only as an opportunity to create a shared understanding among stakeholders, but also as a means to provide a framework for obtaining input from the public. Nedbank Group continues to support a process that brings pertinent issues into the public arena for debate and resolution. To this end the group has a dedicated team, supported through executive endorsement, working with the Competition Commission and the impacted areas internally.

While Nedbank Group is pursuing distinctiveness, it simultaneously needs to cooperate in the NPS environment. This type of cooperation is not a unique feature of the South African environment. Global trends illustrate that cooperation between key stakeholders becomes ever more critical to sustaining a robust and innovative payments system. Nedbank welcomes access to the NPS for both banks and non-banks, and remains committed to participating as a responsible member of the NPS.

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