👉 Background: Last week, CommBank announced a whopping cash profit of $9.8 billion for the last financial year. Most of that coming from its retail and business customers and less from serving customers at the bank branch.

👉 What happened: As part of this annual report, CommBank also highlighted that the provision of cash services is costing them $350 million a year.  In other words, keeping, transferring and issuing cash in ATMs and also at bank branches.

👉 What else: Over the past 6 years, monthly cash ATM withdrawals have dropped by 50%, with some banks aren’t even holding any cash in some branches anymore. But for many people, cash is still an important part of our society.

What's the key learning?

💡Banks are in a delicate dance - trying to trim the fat from their costly, old-school cash services while keeping the regulators off their back. If they cut back cash services too far, regulators might step in with even tougher rules that would make things even more expensive for the banks.

💡While cash payments have dropped from almost 40% of all payments in 2007 to less than 10% of all payments by 2022, Baby Boomers would not deal well with its extinction.

💡In fact, according to research by payment platform Waave, 82% of Baby Boomers were VERY concerned about cash disappearing, and this is quite a timely release of info from CommBank who will face a parliament committee later this month about the use of cash services.