Altron Digital Business (ADB) has published a first-of-its-kind benchmark study to determine how employees experience technology across financial services industry (FSI) institutions in South Africa.

The Employee Technology Experience Index found a correlation between the technology experiences of employees and workforce outcomes such as employee productivity, job satisfaction, retention, employee net promoter score and, ultimately, customer experience and organisational performance.

The study is based on input from 385 employees across eight major banking and insurance institutions, with the aim of delivering a clear, evidence-based view for business leaders of where technology investments are driving value and where they are creating risk.

“For the first time, South African banks and insurers have access to local, evidence-based data that connects technology investment directly to workforce and business outcomes. This shifts the conversation from IT support metrics to strategic performance indicators that belong in the boardroom,” said ADB MD Craig Stewart.

Commissioned by ADB and undertaken by Lightspeed, part of the Kantar Group, the research offers distinctive insights into challenges and opportunities for South Africa’s leading financial services institutions as they modernise their technology foundations to better support employees and customers.

“Technology is no longer a back-office enabler, it is a defining factor in how employees perform, how customers are served and how organisations compete,” he said, highlighting that the study set out to answer three key questions: how technology experiences shape employee experiences, what is the impact on business outcomes and determine a metric to that impact, and where customers or companies can invest for the greatest impact.

The financial services sector, as one of the large engine rooms of the South African economy, accounting for a fifth of the country’s GDP, and one of the most technology-intensive sectors, provided a solid base for the study.

“If you want to understand how technology shapes the people who deliver a service, and whether that friction reaches the end customer, we felt [it was best] to start where the technology density and the stakes are the highest.”

The findings reveal the scale of the cost – and hidden productivity tax: gaps in workplace technology and technology-related friction and disruption cost FSI organisations between R3.2-million and R30-million per 1 000 employees each year.

The report shows that 76 minutes per employee each week is lost to technology disruptions, equivalent to 7.6 working days a year.

With technology friction, many organisations only consider the large inhibitors, such as a network or application outage and measure technology in operational terms such as device fleet age, infrastructure stability, ticket resolution rates and system uptime.

“These metrics describe what IT does. They do not describe what it feels like to work with what the technology IT teams deliver – and they do not connect technology performance to the outcomes that boards care about: talent retention, customer experience and competitive positioning.”

However, the smaller frictions, such as a slow application, having to log in three or four times, waiting on a network or a support ticket “going nowhere”, besides others, adds up.

“Individually, all of these things are quite trivial, but across thousands of people, it adds up to nearly eight working days lost,” he explained, pointing out that, for employers with 50 000-plus employees, for example, this can add up significantly into a material number.

Further, 47% of respondents said that this friction is not just impacting them; it is impacting the customers that they serve or colleague interactions, resulting in a knock-on effect, with 86% of employees disrupted daily or more having delivered worse customer service owing to this.

In addition, a +105-point employee net promoter score gap exists between employees with positive versus poor technology experiences.

Meanwhile, another critical finding is the “visibility gap” emerging within organisations.

“More than 28% of employees have stopped reporting IT issues entirely, while over half (52%) resort to personal devices or unauthorised tools to complete their work – this is a significant governance and information security risk that many boards may not yet have visibility of,” Stewart commented.

Further, 28.6% of employees rely primarily on AI tools they sourced themselves.

The findings noted that while 88% of employees agree that technology enables their best work, and 84% of employees have access to AI tools, only 21% feel their employer is preparing them for an AI-enabled future.

AI readiness was among the three identified priority investment areas for executives seeking to improve both employee and business outcomes.

Bringing the AI adoption that is already happening inside the employer’s environment is an opportunity to lift advocacy and reduce risk in a single move.

While people have access, they are not being enabled to get the best out of AI.

Another lever for companies is IT support, the strongest driver of employee advocacy, job satisfaction and perceived value, and core infrastructure, with foundational systems, particularly network performance, being critical to customer experience.

Quality IT support shows the highest correlation with workforce outcomes tracked at board level, while core infrastructure, particularly the network, is the customer experience lever.

“Network, productivity tools and core applications are the strongest predictors of whether technology friction reaches the customer. These are hygiene factors: investment here will not, by itself, lift employee advocacy, but it directly reduces lost time and protects customer-facing service delivery.”

Collectively, the findings give FSI leaders a clear set of choices: where to invest to prevent damage, where to invest to build advocacy, and where to act before employees solve the problem themselves.

The study reinforces that technology experience is now a critical differentiator in South Africa’s financial services industry. It shapes not only employee productivity but also talent retention, customer satisfaction and institutional competitiveness.

“The cost of poor technology experience on employees is no longer theoretical. We can now put a rand value on it – and that changes everything,” Stewart concluded.