(20 May 2010 – Australia) Suncorp and Bank of Queensland have bucked the current trend of business customers’ falling sentiment with their bank, both improving their overall sentiment score, according to East & Partners’ latest Business Banking Sentiment Index (BBSI).In the April 2010 edition of the BBSI, overall sentiment felt by businesses towards their banks once again fell to just 34.2, using a scale where 10 is low and 100 is high.
However, the overall sentiment scores for both Suncorp and Bank of Queensland are beginning to head north.
“Before the fall-out from the Global Financial Crisis, we did see regional banks in Australia perform well, relative to their Big Four peers, in terms of sentiment”, East & Partners’ head of market analysis, Robert Morgan said.
“However, the backdrop of a challenging lending environment seemed to negate this but we are starting to see this pattern re-emerge for the Regionals”, Mr Morgan concluded.
East & Partners’ Business Banking Sentiment Index is an aggregated rating metric comprising four different measures of customer sentiment – Empathy, Satisfaction, Loyalty and Advocacy.
Each month, East & Partners’ research team conducts telephone interviews with a sample of 750 businesses nationally, providing an in depth study of businesses in the A$1 to 5 million, $5 to 20 million and $20 to 100 million turnover segments across Australia.