How Much Are You Worth per Year to Your Bank?

• A comparison of the average annual fees collected per client, per bank.
• Want to know which bank collects the highest fees and commissions per client, per annum?
• Which Social Media Site Collects the highest ARPU per annum?

The one thing that irks me no end about the banking industry is the amount of money we pay to banks to process and handle our money.

Agreed – people who owe money on loans etc. need to be charged an interest rate, but, to watch your account balance assaulted by bank charges when you have a positive balance AND that money is being used to support the banks main product of lending money is just irksome.

Wandering through Standard Bank this morning I was impressed at the building and décor – lots of bulletproof glass, CCTV, leather chairs and a decidedly upmarket look.

In comparison to Capitec which is very minimalistic and not over the top – it just works for me and my tradesman’s brain.

At this stage I need to tell you about a lesson that my late Father learned in his choice of personal vehicle as an electrical contractor. He always wanted a Mercedes 450 sports car and, when he finally snagged one it was his pride and joy.

He part traded in on his Mercedes 280S and we had great fun driving topless.

BUT

Clients looked at this tradesman in his fancy car, thought (and told him to his face) that he must be ripping them off in order to afford this beauty of a car.

So, business actually went down forcing him to sell the 450 at a loss and buy back his Mercedes 280S.

So what is it about professions when we look at their buildings, vehicles and décor and shy away from those visibly living frugally UNLESS it is a tradesman getting their hands dirty doing jobs the average man would never tackle?

Back to Standard Bank – my first thought is always; “Clients pay for all this, I wonder what would happen if the bank scaled down?”

Basically every bank has as it’s main source of income directly from it’s clients in Fees and Commissions.

You may wonder why different banks that have such vast differences in fees manage to survive? The answer is quite simple; “Different strokes for Different Folks” whilst each has a hook to get virgin bankers into the fold and then upsell on. If you have a hard headed approach and are not susceptible to sales calls then you will save. If not, then; “Sorry for you!”

Annual Fees per Client – The Big Five Banks Comparison:

To provide an accurate, high-level comparison across the “Big Five” banks, the analysis above compiles total South African retail/group clients and maps them against the total Net Fee and Commission Income extracted from each group’s latest available financial results (primarily FY2025/2026 reporting cycles).

Large universal banks (Standard Bank, FirstRand, Absa, Nedbank) include extensive corporate, investment banking, and rest-of-Africa fee streams in their headline aggregates, which pushes their per-capita averages significantly higher than retail-focused Capitec.

Structural Nuances Affecting the Math

FirstRand (FNB) & Nedbank: Their net fee pools encompass immense institutional and commercial wholesale transaction fee volumes. Since their business banking fee pools are aggregated with smaller client denominators, their per-capita figures scale upward dramatically.

Standard Bank: To mirror the methodology accurately, the table isolates Standard Bank’s South African operation parameters (R17.1 billion net fee income divided by ~12.1 million domestic clients), bypassing their rest-of-Africa operations which otherwise bring their group fee total to R35.7 billion.

Absa: Absa experiences unique downward netting pressures on its gross fees due to specific reporting reclassifications (such as cash-in-transit infrastructure costs being deducted straight out of fee revenue rather than recorded under operating expenses).

What About Social Media – Which Social Media Site Collects the highest ARPU per annum?

In banking your money is the product – in almost the same way as in gambling. Think about it, in gambling you bring one hundred rand into the casino, the casino then uses your product (the hundred rand) and you lose most of it to the casino.

This relationship between customer density and revenue extraction isn’t unique to traditional retail banking; it acts as the primary health metric for modern digital networks under the guise of Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). Much like a traditional retail bank assessing how effectively it monetizes a basic transactional check account versus a high-tier corporate suite, global platforms like Facebook (Meta) and Twitter (X) are bound by the exact same commercial calculus. Whether a business charges an overt physical monthly account ledger fee or covertly packages user attention data into targeted advertising inventory, the structural challenge remains identical: how much annual value can you reliably extract from a single active user?

By shifting our lens from local financial institutions to these digital empires, we can see that the financial chasm separating Capitec’s high-volume, lean-margin retail model from FNB’s high-yield corporate cross-selling plays out in almost identical fashion between Meta’s automated ad matrix and X’s evolving premium tier ecosystem.

Annual ARPU Comparison (FY2025/2026 Reporting)

When Massive Efficiencies at Scale Matter:

Just like FNB or Standard Bank charging premium fees for specialized bundled benefits, X has heavily pushed X Premium ($8–$22/month) to build an artificial floor of recurring income from a small subset of power users. Roughly 30% of X’s income now comes from these paid tiers, compensating for reduced broad-base ad traction.

In the bank table above, Standard Bank’s South Africa retail base performs distinctly from its total group. Similarly, a Facebook user in the US/Canada generates a staggering $78.37 per year because local ad markets are highly competitive, while a user in developing regions averages significantly lower numbers (~$7) due to lower local ad spends.

If you look at LinkedIn strictly through its active user base (~310 million MAUs), its ARPU jumps to $63.87. This surpasses Facebook’s global average (~$57) because LinkedIn isn’t just selling cheap consumer attention. It targets premium B2B decision-makers with high-yield talent-acquisition tools, mirroring how a corporate banking division pulls massive fees from fewer, highly valuable business clients.

Mimicking Capitec’s massive efficiencies at scale, Meta generates over $2.5 million in revenue per single employee by matching 3 billion users to automated pipelines, proving that a standardized, lean digital product yields high margins—much like Capitec’s approach to mass-market retail banking.

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Alan Straton

Chief Cook, Bottle Washer and Broom Mechanic at MyPE

Passionate about Port Elizabeth and definitely NOT packing for Perth. Alan's ethos is epitomised in the words of Nelson Mandela; "I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the idea of a democratic and free society. If need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." See more articles by Alan.

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