‘We didn’t get the communication right on this’: CommBank backflips on controversial fees
The Commonwealth Bank has been forced to backflip on its plan to charge customers to withdraw money from branches and banks, admitting it “didn’t get the communication right on this”.
On Tuesday afternoon, Commonwealth Bank announced it would move customers who currently have a Complete Access account to a Smart Access account, which charges a $3 “assisted withdrawal fee” for withdrawing cash from bank tellers, post offices, or by phone. The move was met with widespread outrage, with numerous MPs from both sides of the aisle speaking out against the changes.
Group executive of retail banking services Angus Sullivan was forced to front the press on Wednesday afternoon, where he said the bank was “pause” the change for impacted customers.
“We know that account changes are difficult, and especially at this time of year and with so many Australians challenged with cost of living pressures, we’ve decided to announce a change in our approach,” he said, pointing out this change is beneficial to 90% of Complete Access customers, who will continue to be migrated “to the lower monthly account keeping fee bank account option”.
Sullivan continued: “If that doesn’t work for customers, of course, they can be in contact with us and we can arrange an alternative solution for them.
“The other customers – those that we expected might be slightly worse off and need more support in making sure that their banking arrangements were appropriate – we’re going to pause the changes that we announced, and we’re going to spend the next six months individually engaging with each of those customers to make sure that we have a solution tailored for each one of them.”
Sullivan said the backflip was “based on us listening to our customers and making sure that we do the best that we can by them” – with the extensive media coverage no doubt a contributing factor also.
“As I mentioned, we feel we didn’t get the communication right on this,” Sullivan continued, “and so we’ve paused, and we want to take a different approach, the approach that we’ve outlined, of having a more individual approach engaging each of the customers to make sure we’ve got a solution.
“So it’s very much from listening to our customers and making sure that we adapt our approaches.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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That was a whole lot of words to just say “we are going to wait six months until the heat dies down and then implement this more discreetly”.
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We didn’t get the communication right on this? I think what Angus means is we’re serving you up a plate of sh*t, we forgot to pop sprinkles on top. This is what is wrong with executives expecting their Comms teams to turn a turd into Fillet Mignon. How about we point the finger back at Angus, Matt and the exec team (yes that means you Monique) and ask why in the climate of branch and ATM closures and increasing Govt, Media and – most importantly – Customer scrutiny, did they think this was a good idea? I’ll bet CBAs $9bn+ profit the Comms team provided the advice that this was going to be a sh*t show, which was ignored, and now they’re forced into this embarrassing backflip with the Comms team in the firing line for not doing their job properly. Couldn’t the multimillion dollar salary exec club of CommBank just admit, ‘we got it wrong, we’ll do better’ (which we know they won’t).
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What “Read the room” said x 1000
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