Mystery Shopping

Retail banking mystery shopping: Q1 2026 regional scorecard

Our January-to-March 2026 mystery-shopping wave across six Southern African markets — which bank chains moved up, which slipped, and the themes that cut across.

Tendai Chikore14 March 20267 min read

We completed 1,840 scored branch visits across Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe between January and March 2026. The scorecard covers greeting, queue management, product knowledge, closure and digital-channel promotion.

Overall regional scores are up 3.2 points year-on-year, driven mainly by faster queue management and better digital-onboarding referrals. Product knowledge on secured lending remains the weakest dimension — a gap that shows up in all six markets.

Banks that rolled out structured "first-five-minutes" scripts in 2025 are seeing the sharpest scorecard improvements. The branches that still rely on informal training pick up the lowest marks in the secret-shopper notes.