Assessing affluent card market in 6 African countries

For banks and wealth managers, customers from the affluent segment are more profitable than those from the traditional banking mass market.

Banking the affluent customer segment is highly competitive. Affluent customers are sought after and have the power to switch to a bank with a better customer value proposition (CVP). As a result, banks spend time and money developing specialised CVP not only to attract but also retain affluent customers.

For most African banks, developing the winning affluent CVP is expensive, thus a number of these propositions are supplied by card schemes. Through providing affluent market cards, banks manage to attract and retain affluent customers at a relatively low cost.

An international card association was looking to enter the affluent card market in a number of African countries. To successfully do this, it needed to understand the demand and supply landscape within the affluent market segment. Genesis generated a report and a go-to-market strategy for the client to successfully penetrate each of the markets.

Genesis assessed key competitors, payment trends, customer card preferences, bank card value propositions, affluent customer profiles and the total affluent market size and POS opportunity per each market.

Through this assessment, and using financial modelling, the team was able to quantify the affluent card opportunity for each African country and provide a tailored go‑to‑market strategy to successfully penetrate each of the markets.

This analysis was able to inform the international card scheme on which markets and banks to prioritise and assisted with their go-to-market strategy.