Standard Bank and Capitec beat FNB, Absa, and Nedbank in media sentiment rankings

PressPulse’s latest media sentiment report reveals that Standard Bank and Capitec have a significant lead over FNB, Absa, and Nedbank.

Standard Bank, South Africa’s largest bank by assets, has maintained a strong financial trajectory, and its recent interim results were no exception.

Standard Bank’s headline earnings per share grew by 10% and return on equity improved to 19.1%.

The bank’s CEO, Sim Tshabalala, said the strong performance was driven by continued robust franchise momentum and active capital management.

Capitec, which has been a darling of JSE investors for two decades, has also released very strong financial results expectations.

It expects a big rise in earnings, driven by aggressive growth in its loan book and strong performance in its insurance and business banking divisions.

Headline earnings per share will be between 20% and 25% higher, and earnings per share are expected to increase by a similar percentage.

Capitec said income from value-added services and Capitec Connect continued to grow, supported by sustained growth in client adoption of these offerings.

FNB remains the crown jewel of the FirstRand group, contributing roughly 56% of total normalised earnings.

The bank’s normalised earnings grew 8% to R23.6 billion, and it achieved an exceptional 37.4%, which remains the highest in the South African banking sector.

Absa is currently in a period of transition under new leadership and will release its latest results next month.

In a voluntary trading update last year, the bank said it had successfully navigated a major organisational restructure.

Nedbank’s results for the six months to 30 June 2025 showed 6% growth in headline earnings to R8.4 billion and return on equity of 15.2%.

The increase in headline earnings was driven by non-interest revenue and associate income growth, as well as an ongoing improvement in the impairment charge.

Another positive factor included good management of underlying expenses. However, it was partially offset by muted net interest income growth.

Standard Bank and Capitec dominate media sentiment rankings

PressPulse’s latest media sentiment report showed that Standard Bank and Capitec achieved much better media sentiment scores than the other banks.

PressPulse is an online media-sentiment tracking platform that developed a custom artificial intelligence sentiment-measuring system.

It tracks South Africa’s top business publications and measures companies’ success in achieving positive exposure in these media publications.

The sentiment ranking is based on the number of positive, neutral, or negative articles and the reach and influence of the publication where they are published.

Each company is assigned a sentiment score. A positive score indicates overall positive exposure, while a negative score indicates negative exposure.

The size of the score indicates the impact of the exposure. A big positive score, for example, shows that a company enjoyed highly impactful positive exposure.

Press Pulse’s sentiment analysis for South Africa’s banking sector showed that Standard Bank had a small lead over Capitec.

Both banks achieved exceptional scores, which showed that they had excellent marketing and media strategies to amplify their positives in the media.

FNB sat in the middle, while Absa and Nedbank failed to achieve the same positive exposure as their counterparts.