Banks in Oman urged to prioritise customer service

Oman’s banking transformation can increasingly be measured in transactions rather than intentions.
Central Bank of Oman data shows that OmanNet processed almost 597 million transactions in 2025, while the Mobile Payment Clearing and Switching System handled more than 339 million. On June 16, 2026, the CBO announced zero charges on local digital transfers for retail customers and small and medium enterprises under reforms to national payment-system fees.
The direction is clear. Routine banking is moving rapidly from the counter to the screen.
That is a gain for customers as much as for banks. Digital services save journeys, reduce transaction costs and allow many financial tasks to be completed in seconds. But their success also raises the next question for Oman’s banking sector: if transfers, payments and account management increasingly become standard digital functions, what distinguishes one bank from another when the customer actually needs help?
The answer may increasingly be service.
This is not an argument for returning to a branch-heavy banking model. Banks have valid reasons to reduce branch costs as customers migrate online. Some transactions also require time because of customer verification, fraud prevention, anti-money laundering controls and other safeguards.
A bank should therefore not be judged simply by how quickly it moves a queue. The more meaningful test is whether it solves the customer’s problem.
As simple transactions migrate online, customers who still need a person are increasingly likely to arrive with cases that an application cannot resolve: an account restriction, disputed transaction, financing question, documentation requirement or a digital process that has reached its limit.
There are also customers who remain less comfortable with digital banking, including some older people and those with limited digital skills. Their need for human assistance does not disappear because most transactions have moved online.
Banks measure their own efficiency extensively — capital, liquidity, profitability, operating costs, credit quality and transaction volumes. Yet one cost created by a banking transaction remains far less visible: the customer’s time.
For an employee, hours spent resolving a banking problem can mean time away from work. For a small business owner, repeated visits carry an opportunity cost. For someone travelling from another wilayat, the cost may include transport and much of a working day.
A service can therefore carry no explicit fee and still impose a real economic cost.
The solution is not an arbitrary stopwatch. A complicated financing matter cannot reasonably be compared with a simple counter transaction and speed should never come at the expense of security.
The better measure is the outcome.
Was the problem resolved at the first appropriate point of contact? Did the customer have to return because requirements were not explained clearly? Was the case repeatedly transferred between employees? When a digital process failed, was there an accessible route to someone capable of resolving it?
Oman already has a regulatory foundation for this. The CBO’s Financial Consumer Protection Regulatory Framework requires licensed institutions to maintain complaint-handling systems and calls for complaints to be addressed effectively, promptly and fairly. The CBO also has a Financial Conduct and Consumer Protection Department and formal channels for customer complaints.
The gap is therefore not the absence of consumer protection. It is how visibly service outcomes are measured.
An IMF review of CBO transparency published in 2025 found that the central bank was analysing complaint information and developing periodic statistical reporting. It recommended greater public disclosure of consumer-protection outcomes and suggested consideration of a dedicated consumer-protection report.
That recommendation deserves renewed attention as digital banking accelerates.
International experience offers useful guidance. Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority increasingly focuses on customer outcomes rather than processes alone. In July 2026, it emphasised the need for firms to turn customer experience into measurable indicators and use them to identify where consumers encounter difficulty.
Australia has taken a transparency-based approach, launching a public complaints dashboard in March 2026 that allows users to examine complaints reported by financial firms and how they are handled.
Oman need not copy either model.
A practical next step would be for the CBO, in consultation with banks, to develop a limited set of financial consumer outcome indicators and publish them periodically. These could include complaint-resolution times, repeat contacts over the same issue, first-contact resolution where appropriate, access to human assistance after a failed digital journey and selected measures of branch service.
Such indicators would need context. Larger banks may naturally receive more complaints, while complex cases may require longer resolution times. Public reporting could therefore begin at sector level rather than as a league table.
The objective should not be to name and shame institutions. It should be to identify where friction is occurring.
Digital banking will continue to expand and it should. But the strongest banking model is one in which routine transactions disappear seamlessly into digital channels while human expertise becomes easier to reach when the transaction is no longer routine.
Products can be replicated. Digital features can be copied. Pricing differences can narrow.
What customers remember is how difficult — or how easy — a bank was to deal with when something went wrong.
Oman already measures how efficiently money moves. The next logical step is to measure, with similar discipline, whether the customer’s problem was actually solved.