Kate Emery: Prepare the violins, Commonwealth Bank is suffering too

Being charged to access your own money from your own bank branch. That’s a new one. In defence of Commonwealth Bank’s plan to charge some customers $3 to access their money, times are tough for Australia’s biggest banks. Last financial year Commonwealth only made $9.5 billion in profit. To you and me and every Australian struggling to fill a supermarket bag for less than $100 or pay for the kids’ school books, that might sound like a lot of money. But to a bank with a chief executive to pay (Matt Comyn took home $7.3 million last year) and shareholders to keep happy, it’s the equivalent of the spare change jar. As Mr Comyn told last year’s Senate inquiry, making cash available for customers costs the bank about $400 million every year. Why should a bank have to spend so much money to make cash available to its customers anyway? Shouldn’t a bank be more focused on its core job of. . . well, not making cash available to customers, apparently. While $9.5 billion looks like a lot on paper (so many zeroes), it represented a six per cent decline for Commonwealth from the previous year’s record profit. Given that important context, it’s far easier to understand the bank’s decision to introduce a tax on those customers who might want to go to the bank in person, even if those people are statistically more likely to be older Australians, people from culturally diverse backgrounds and others who struggle to access ATMs or online banking. Exactly what Commonwealth is up to is more complex than the headlines on this story suggest. But getting bogged down in the minutia is just what banks hope customers will do because then they might wind up too confused to move their money. The short version is that a bunch of Commonwealth customers who have “complete access” accounts are being shunted across to “smart access” accounts from 2025. Those accounts come with a $3 “assisted withdrawal fee” for (most) customers taking out money at bank branches or post offices. Other, smaller banks, including Bendigo Bank and Adelaide Bank, have introduced similar changes. They got away with it because they’re not the biggest bank in the country and they haven’t recently run an entire “Can Lives Here” advertising campaign about all the things that customers who bank with them “can” do. Clearly, banks like Commonwealth are suffering from this cost-of-living crunch like the rest of the country. It’s just that instead of having to live out of their car, work two jobs or go to Foodbank when they run out of groceries, Commonwealth is being forced to go after those of its customers who still like to get their cash from their local bank branch and charge them for the privilege. It would be a terrible shame if those affected customers responded by showing Commonwealth exactly where they “can” shove their latest cash grab.