The best and worst South African banking apps

Millions of South Africans use smartphone apps to make payments and manage their accounts and spending limits.

Smartphone banking apps have become so successful that former FNB CEO Michael Jordaan has launched Bank Zero, a digital-only bank which will be run entirely on an app.

He is confident that a smartphone app can provide Bank Zero clients with all the functionality they need, allowing it to compete against traditional banks.

Apart from the benefits of being able to bank wherever you are, using a banking app also provides users with better security than online banking.

Most banking apps are not susceptible to SIM-swop or porting fraud, and users can still receive transaction info even if their mobile number has been hijacked.

South African banking app ratings

While new banks like Bank Zero and Discovery Bank has an advantage over traditional banks as they do not have to support legacy systems, the big banks are not sitting back.

FNB, Absa, Standard Bank, Nedbank, and Capitec have all invested heavily in their smartphone apps to ensure the best possible experience to their users.

This raises the question which South African mobile banking apps are the best.

To answer this question, MyBroadband looked at the user ratings of these apps in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

The data revealed a surprising trend – the traditional banks comfortably outperform the newcomer Discovery Bank.

This shows that experience counts and that the new digital banks will have to do very well to beat the large, established banks.

The table below shows the average user rating score of mobile banking apps from large South African banks.