Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn makes shock cash confession

The boss of Australia’s largest bank has admitted he doesn’t have a lot of cash on hand.

Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn made the revelation during a July to December 2023 results presentation.

“I don’t think there’s more than $100 in it,” he said Wednesday.

‘A very large majority of people choose to use electronic payments and online banking and view it as a superior experience and not an inferior alternative.’

Since Mr Comyn took over as CEO in April 2018, the Commonwealth Bank has closed a third of its branches and removed more than half of its ATMs.

The number of branches has decreased by 354, from 1,082 to 728.

The 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 branch in Perth, which does not offer cash transactions at the counter.

Meanwhile, the number of CBA ATMs has fallen by 54 percent, or 2,297, from 4,253 to 1,956 since 2018.

The Commonwealth Bank opened its first ‘service centre’ in Sydney’s South Everleigh in 2020, as the pandemic saw even more consumers switch from using cash to tap-and-go payments.

Before the first case of Covid was discovered in Australia, fewer transactions were being made in cash; in 2019, 32 percent of personal payments were made.

That fell to 16 percent in 2022, a Reserve Bank report showed.

Even small transactions are made with a card, with an RBA survey showing that these represent 73 percent of personal purchases under $10.

Mr Comyn has made no apologies about the phasing out of ATMs. Last year he told a parliamentary committee on rural banking that distributing cash was expensive.

“A sustainable commercial model matters,” he said.

“An ATM costs about $30,000 a year to operate.”

Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn admitted as much during a July to December 2023 results presentation

Mr Comyn argued that customers who did not use cash were cross-subsidizing those who did.

“However, many of our customers do not use cash, and these customers are cross-subsidizing those who do,” he said.

‘Some degree of cross-subsidy is of course inevitable in any large company, but becomes problematic if the level of cross-subsidy becomes too great.

“As time passes, it becomes unsustainable to invest substantial resources and maintain expensive services that fewer and fewer customers use.”

The Commonwealth Bank made a record cash profit of $10.164 billion in 2022-2023 and on Wednesday announced a half-year profit of $5.019 billion for the period July to December 2023 or the first half of 2023-2024.