Big four fare hardly better on customer trust than crisis ravaged German banks

Australian banks are only marginally more trusted than crisis battered German banks even though Australia has one of the stronger world economies with the recent mining boom and Asia Pacific connections compared to Germany being struck by the Euro crises.

Australian Big Banks vs German Big Banks

Recent study, using a methodology to dimensionalise trust, uncovers what the bank’s trust is (not) made of. The methodology, HuTrust®, is globally the only psychologically sound, statistically robust and practically proven understanding of trust. 
HuTrust® analyses what the Big 4 banks in Australia and the big banks in Germany are trusted for – and not. Developed by mext Managing Director Stefan Grafe with a German psychologist and psychology professor W. Salber, HuTrust® has successfully been applied with organisations like Qatar Airways, KPN Europe, Origin, Telstra and the Singaporean Government.

In the recently released 2012 study mext focused on the major banks with 657 respondents. This follows the initial study with AOR at the end of 2010 with 1,200 respondents and is compared with a similar study of German banks from 2011 conducted by international Research HuTrust® partner Psyma.

CBA, Westpac, nab and ANZ continue to have very similar customer trust, NPS and satisfaction levels. All just make the trust threshold. Nothing new there. It is interesting though; that German banks in the middle of the crisis (Sept 2011) didn’t score much lower. 
Indeed, locally focused banks scored far higher than the national brands. We saw similar findings here in the last study with Bendigo Bank ranking far higher than the Big 4. This has now normalised.

The Big 4 didn’t suffer a lot here because of the relatively lower impact of the GFC and government guarantees. Still, in Germany big commercial banks such as Deutsche Bank, have only fallen just under the trust threshold at 6.7.
For more information download report here.

Stefan Grafe is an author, trust expert and founder of mext consulting. Always seeking better and more innovative solutions for stakeholder engagement.