ABSA

ABSA commissioned Newmark to conduct a competitive intelligence study across nine African markets: Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Botswana, Uganda, Mauritius, Mozambique, and Seychelles. Standard market research would have produced a map of formal banking competitors — other retail banks, digital banking platforms, and financial services providers.

But in most African markets, the most important competition for customer trust and financial behaviour does not come from formal sector competitors at all. The brief required an intelligence methodology capable of seeing the full competitive landscape.

Newmark deployed the Field Intelligence System (FIS™) — a proprietary methodology that maps competition across three categories:

• Direct competitors (same sector, same offering)
• Indirect competitors (same customer need, different means)
• Substitution competitors (what the customer does instead of engaging with the category)

In African financial markets, substitution competitors — tontines, informal savings groups, mobile money platforms, and community-based financial networks — are frequently the most powerful competitors a retail bank faces.

Field research teams operated across all nine markets simultaneously, conducting structured interviews with community leaders, traders, regulators, informal sector participants, and target customer segments.

The research mapped financial behaviour through formal and informal channels, identifying the trust architecture that governed financial decision-making in each market. Standard surveys and desk research were supplemented by direct community engagement — conversations that only happen when researchers are present in the communities they are studying.