Credit card data from FNB shows, through our spending habits, how the Covid-19 pandemic changed the lives of consumers in South Africa over the past year.
The lender said it made use of aggregated FNB client credit card spend by various expenditure categories in individual shopping centres/malls, to enhance its insights into the retail property market.
The data sample is quite extensive, with approximately 2,400 retail centres included. FNB highlighted some key spending themes emanating from the data through 2020:
Smaller economic regions fared better
In the early stages of “hard” lockdown, around April 2020, it had already become apparent to that South Africa’s major city regions’ economies, and thus their retail centres too,…