When ABSA commissioned Newmark to research the competitive landscape across nine African banking markets, the brief was straightforward: understand who is competing for our customers' financial trust and behaviour in each market. Standard market research would have produced a list of formal banking competitors — other retail banks, microfinance institutions, digital banking platforms. The FIS™ methodology produced something quite different.

Across the nine markets studied — Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Botswana, Uganda, Mauritius, Mozambique, and Seychelles — a consistent pattern emerged. In several markets, the most powerful competitors for customer trust and financial behaviour were not formal financial institutions at all. They were tontines (rotating savings and credit associations), mobile money platforms that operated outside the formal banking system, community-based savings groups, and informal credit networks governed by social trust rather than contractual obligation.

The significance of this finding is not simply that informal competitors exist. It is that the informal sector represents a fundamentally different trust architecture — one that most formal financial institutions do not understand and are not equipped to compete with effectively. Tontines are not just financial products. They are social institutions that produce trust through community accountability, mutual obligation, and relationship-based credit assessment. Competing with a tontine on product features is like competing with a community centre on square footage. You are measuring the wrong thing.

“Competing with a tontine on product features is like competing with a community centre on square footage.”

Understanding this competitive landscape required field research that went far beyond standard survey methodology. Our researchers conducted structured conversations with community leaders, informal sector traders, tontine members, and mobile money users — gathering data about financial behaviour that no formal survey instrument can reach, because the relevant information is social rather than transactional. This is the kind of intelligence that can only be gathered in the field, by researchers who are trusted by the communities they are studying.

The strategic implications for ABSA were significant. In several markets, the most valuable opportunity was not to compete directly with informal financial systems but to design products and communications that built on the trust architecture they represented — demonstrating that formal banking could offer the same social accountability and community connection that informal systems provided, combined with the formal protections and access to capital that informal systems could not. This is strategy that is only available to organisations that can see the full competitive landscape — formal and informal — and design for it.