What Your Terminal Leaves Out of the Saudi Bank Consensus

Banks can produce bigger or smaller beats in the same quarter depending on whose forecasts are counted.

Saudi National Bank made SAR6.45 billion in the third quarter of 2026. Depending on whose forecast you use, that either beat expectations by 1.5% or missed them by 2.6%.

The bank’s performance didn’t change between those two verdicts. What differed was what each analyst had expected.

Both are true. The first figure uses all 11 forecasts that Argaam compiled before the results, while the second uses only the six from regional brokers.

Before a bank reports, analysts publish what they expect it to earn. Average those forecasts and you have the consensus. If the bank earns more than that, it has “beaten” expectations.

Banque Saudi Fransi beat by 3%. But count only the regional brokers and the beat almost vanishes, at 0.06%. The bank’s profit never changed. What changed is whose forecasts you average.

A consensus is simply the average of the forecasts available. Which forecasts are available changes from quarter to quarter.

Since the second quarter of 2023, Argaam’s pre-results tables have carried forecasts from international banks in nine of fourteen quarters.

Six houses have appeared across that period, among them Citi, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan — but not in every quarter, and not all at once.

The international banks only cover the largest Saudi lenders. So this analysis keeps only those cases where both international and regional analysts forecast the same bank in the same quarter.

In total, the analysis covers 52 bank-quarters across seven banks, comparing 111 international forecasts against 345 regional ones.

In almost 90% (46 of those 52) of the bank-quarters, the average international forecast was lower than the average regional one, typically by about 5% of the profit reported, and that held on average in every quarter.

International analysts underestimated profits in 82% of their forecasts, against 62% for regional ones. Both groups were more often too low than too high, but the international banks far more consistently so.

The spread tells the same story. The middle half of international forecasts ran from 10.6% to 3.3% below the eventual profit, entirely on the low side.

Regional forecasts behave differently. Their middle half runs from 6.3% below the eventual profit to 2.4% above it — some too low, some too high, with the real figure somewhere among them.

The gap goes further. Compare the two groups on the same bank in the same quarter, and almost half of the international forecasts sat below the lowest regional one — not below the regional average, below the most pessimistic regional forecast on the table.

Intelligence frame

What this looks like in practice

Five regional analysts expect a bank to earn SAR1 billion. Average forecast: SAR1 billion.

The bank reports SAR1.02 billion. That’s SAR20 million more than expected — a 2% beat.

Now add five international analysts to the panel. They expect SAR900 million. The average of all ten forecasts is now SAR950 million.

The bank still reports SAR1.02 billion. But against SAR950 million, that’s SAR70 million more than expected — a 7% beat.

Nothing about the bank changed. The only thing that moved was who was counted in the average.

Which number a reader sees depends on where they look. International data services and Argaam’s regional panel collect forecasts from different analysts, so the same quarter can produce a bigger or smaller beat depending on the source.

Financial data providers like Bloomberg, Refinitiv (LSEG), FactSet, and Visible Alpha compile consensus estimates from sell-side equity analysts. While the aggregated consensus figure is widely distributed, the granular breakdown of which specific analysts contributed to that specific average is often tightly restricted.

Is that caution a flaw? It depends on which way the surprise runs.

When banks earned more than regional analysts had expected, the international forecasts were 10.4% below the actual profit on average. The regional ones were 5.6% below.

So when profits surprised on the upside, the international banks were roughly twice as far from the answer.

When banks earned less than regional analysts expected, both groups were about equally close to the actual profit.

So the gap holds whichever way the quarter goes. International forecasts sit around five percentage points below regional ones regardless of the outcome.

The caution is built into how international analysts forecast, not a reaction to what happened. A similar ordering has been found elsewhere: in eight Asian emerging markets in 1994–2003, local analysts’ stock recommendations were more optimistic than foreign ones (Lai and Teo, 2008).

This matters for foreign investors in a practical way.

A bank’s result is judged against the average of all the forecasts made for it. International analysts consistently forecast lower, so every one of them added pulls that average down — and a lower average makes the same profit look like a bigger beat.

The numbers show it. Across the 52 cases, profits came in 3% above the full consensus on average, but only 1.7% above the regional forecasts on their own.

Almost half of a bank’s apparent outperformance comes from whose forecasts are counted, not from how the bank traded.

Of the 35 cases where a bank beat the full consensus, five disappear once the international forecasts are removed. SNB’s latest quarter is one of them.

Familiarity was supposed to close this gap: a 32-country study found that local analysts’ edge shrinks as foreign investors take a bigger part in a market (Bae, Stulz and Tan, 2008). Saudi Arabia opened the market to qualified foreign investors in 2015 and entered MSCI’s emerging-markets index in 2019, and international analysts have been covering these banks ever since. They might reasonably have been expected to converge on the regional view over time.

They have not. If anything, the gap is wider in the two most recent quarters than in 2023, though nine quarters are too few to call that a trend.

When a Saudi bank is reported to have beaten expectations, the useful question is whose.

Editorial Note

We publish without bylines. Our research is produced collectively — analysts, editors and data specialists working on the same questions — and the findings reflect the judgement of the team rather than of any individual.

This is a deliberate choice. It keeps the argument, rather than its author, as the thing a reader weighs.