Commonwealth Bank close thousands of ATMs

The Commonwealth Bank has closed 354 branches in the past five years and plans to close another three branches in populated areas of three major cities next month.

Despite record profits, Australia’s largest housing provider has closed a third of its branches since June 2018, when 1,082 were still operating.

Due to a sharp decline in the use of cash, the CBA also removed 2,297 ATMs during the period, representing a 54 percent drop, or halving, in the number of banknote machines.

The Commonwealth Bank now plans to close its Rundle Mall branch in central Adelaide on March 1, along with branches in Coolangatta on the Gold Coast and Coogee in Sydney.

“Following a recent review, we have made the difficult decision to permanently close our branches in Rundle Mall Adelaide, Coolangatta and Coogee,” a spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia on Friday.

Bankwest, a subsidiary of Commonwealth Bank, will also close branches in Perth and regional Western Australia in the coming weeks.

Customer demand at Commonwealth Bank’s Rundle Street Mall branch had fallen 47 per cent in the past five years. located near other existing establishments including King William and Gouger streets in Adelaide city centre.

The Coolangatta branch is located near Tweed Heads in the north NSW and Elanora on the Gold Coast, with customer visits down 29 per cent since 2018.

The Coogee branch near the beach has seen a 52 per cent drop in customer demand over the past five years, with customers also visiting nearby Randwick, Maroubra, Bondi Junction and Westfield Eastgardens branches in Sydney’s south east.

But Finance Sector Union national secretary Julia Angrisano said the branch closures showed how the CBA put people over profits, with the Commonwealth Bank making a record net cash profit of $10.164 billion in 2022-23.

“What a thrill for our members who work at these locations at the beginning of the year,” she says.

The closure of the branches means five employees will lose their jobs at Coolangatta, a popular tourist spot on the south side of the Gold Coast, near the Queensland border.

A further 13 jobs will be lost at Rundle Mall, despite estimates that 800,000 people pass through there every week.

But the Commonwealth Bank said 21 of the 22 affected branch workers at those three branches had been redeployed.

“We are also supporting the remaining staff member in finding potential opportunities,” the spokesperson said.

This comes as the Commonwealth Bank and its rivals scale back city branches so tellers no longer hand out cash.

“These closures should not be happening and it just shows that CBA is continually abandoning its ‘bricks and mortar’ office network,” Ms Angrisano said.

‘The CBA claims branches are closing due to a decline in over-the-counter transactions, but the reality is they are forcing staff to transition customers to digital banking by directing them to a computer terminal in the branch.’

The Commonwealth Bank told a parliamentary inquiry in September that it had 728 branches.

This even lower than the 741 figure for June 2023 in the bank’s annual report, but this figure also included ‘service centres’ which do not carry out daily cash transactions but offer things like home loan advice and banking apps.

That updated figure included Commonwealth Bank branches and Bankwest subsidiaries in Perth and regional Western Australia.

The closure of a further three Commonwealth Bank branches and a further three Bankwest branches would reduce the number of CBA Group to 722.

Bankwest announced last week it would close two more branches, including the Maddington branch in Perth’s south-east and Kununurra in Western Australia’s far north, on February 29 and April 18 respectively.

The Armadale branch in Perth’s south-east was closed January 18.

This comes less than two years after Bankwest closed its remaining branches on the east coast, making it a digital-only bank for those outside WA.

Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn told a parliamentary inquiry into regional banking in September that CBA branch closures were mainly in metropolitan areas, with CBA promising no regional branch closures until 2026.

In small towns like Laurieton on the NSW north coast, CBA operates the only branch, with NAB closing in 2022, ANZ in 2018 and Westpac the first to withdraw in 2017.

This means NAB, ANZ and Westpac customers will have to drive 33km north to Port Macquarie to do their banking in person if they get scammed or have problems with their banking app.

The Commonwealth Bank in Laurieton closes at 1pm Monday to Friday, giving customers a small window of three and a half hours to complete their banking in person.

This is much earlier than the 4pm closure for CBA branches in provincial regional centers and major cities.

Laurieton’s median age of 67 is also significantly higher than the national median age of 38 in the 2021 census, suggesting that three of the four major banks are not targeting an older demographic than those likely to struggle with technology.

As recently as June 2018, the Commonwealth Bank had 1,082 branches.

At the time, CBA had 4,253 ATMs, but that has since fallen by 54 percent to 1,956.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia Group’s 741 branches and ‘service centres’ as of June 2023, including BankWest branches in WA, made up 20.6 per cent of Australia’s 3,588 branches, based on Australian Prudential Regulation Authority data.

“We recognize that some customers prefer over-the-counter banking and it is one of the reasons we are proud to have the largest branch network in the country,” the CBA spokesperson said.

The 1,956 ATMs make up 34 percent of all 5,693 ATMs in Australia.

In 2022, cash made up just 16 percent of in-person transactions, less than half the 32 percent of 2019 before the pandemic, Reserve Bank data shows.