FNB customers continue to prove that every penny counts when it comes to building a savings culture. The Bank’s customers are tapping into innovative and automated ways to save, such as using the Bank Your Change® saving feature that is activated through the FNB App to automate saving small amounts from a transactional account into a linked savings account.
In the past four years, the Bank’s customers have used the Bank Your Change® feature to save an astounding R6.6 billion from amounts ranging between R2 and R50. The feature allows all customers with an FNB bank account to save a percentage of their change each time they use their FNB debit card to make a purchase. The functionality rounds up every transaction to the nearest Rand value that the customer chooses and deposits the difference into their linked FNB savings account.
Himal Parbhoo, CEO of FNB Cash Investments, says, “This innovative feature has been instrumental in helping our customers save effortlessly and build financial buffers for emergencies or unforeseen expenses. The success we continue to see with this automated approach to saving also demonstrates the power of allowing consumers more control over the way they manage their money. While our country’s challenges with building a savings culture are well documented, efforts to automate savings could go a long way in helping many consumers adopt positive money habits. This is a key focus in our institution as we continue to help customers with advice-led solutions to help them unlock savings potential in their day-to-day financial activities.
“We are delighted to see that our customers continue to see the value of taking advantage of our simple but effective savings solution despite the prevailing economic conditions that continue to put pressure on household income. The upside of consistently saving is that our customers also earn competitive interest rates on their savings, which could go a long way in a high interest rate environment,” adds Parbhoo.
In South Africa, July is designated as Savings Month. However, the average citizen faces a variety of obstacles to saving money, including the high cost of living and limited financial education. An automated savings solution such as Bank Your Change® is proving to be one of the instruments that could help consumers, irrespective of how much income they make.
