The boss of Australia’s biggest bank has admitted he doesn’t carry much cash.
Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn made the disclosure during an earnings presentation covering July to December 2023.
“I don’t think there’s more than $100 in there,” he said Wednesday.
“A large majority of people are choosing to use electronic payments and online banking and see it as a superior experience and not an inferior substitute.”
Since Comyn took over as chief executive in April 2018, Commonwealth Bank has closed a third of its branches and removed more than half of its ATMs.
The boss of Australia’s largest bank admitted he doesn’t carry much cash (pictured, file image)
The number of branches has been reduced by 354, from 1,082 to 728.
CBA plans to close branches at Rundle Mall in central Adelaide, Coolangatta on the Gold Coast and Coogee in Sydney on March 1.
It now operates 13 “service centres” in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, including a Bankwest outlet in Perth that does not offer over-the-counter cash transactions.
Meanwhile, the number of CBA ATMs has fallen by 54 percent, or 2,297, from 4,253 to 1,956 since 2018.
Commonwealth Bank opened its first “service centre” in 2020 in Sydney’s South Everleigh, as the pandemic caused even more consumers to switch from cash to tap-and-go payments.
Fewer cash transactions were taking place before the first Covid case was detected in Australia; In 2019, 32 percent of payments were made in person.
That figure fell to 16 per cent in 2022, according to a Reserve Bank report.
Even small transactions are made by card; an RBA survey shows they account for 73 percent of transactions under $10.
Comyn has made no apologies for the phasing out of ATMs and last year told a parliamentary committee on rural banking that distributing cash was expensive.
“A sustainable business model does matter,” he said.
“An ATM costs about $30,000 a year to run.”
Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn made the admission during a results presentation covering July to December 2023.
Comyn argued that customers who did not use cash were subsidizing those who did.
“However, many of our customers do not use cash and these customers subsidize those who do,” he said.
‘Of course, some level of cross-subsidy is inevitable in any large company, but it becomes problematic if the level of cross-subsidy increases too much.
“As time goes by, it becomes unsustainable to invest substantial resources and maintain expensive services that fewer and fewer customers use.”
Commonwealth Bank made a record cash profit of $10.164 billion in 2022-23 and on Wednesday announced a half-year cash profit of $5.019 billion spanning July to December 2023 or the first half of 2023-24.