The Commonwealth Bank announced a slightly higher than expected profit of $11 billion for the last financial year, though the country’s biggest lender warned that home loan applications have dropped since the federal budget and some households are having a tough time.

CBA said the economy remained resilient although growth is slowing. Higher interest rates and inflation is putting uneven pressure on household incomes.

While housing applications fell 15pc since the federal budget, the drops appear to have stabilised. Westpac, earlier in the week, said the same thing. Businesses continue to manage higher costs and greater uncertainty.

The bank grew at or above system in each of its five core domestic product categories: home lending, business lending, consumer finance, household deposits and business deposits.

There are some signs of fraying at the edges. The bank’s loan impairment expense increased as did arrears and it was concentrated in its retail business. The bank said overall credit quality remained sound. Its share price closed up 0.6 per cent.

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Greed-o-meter

Fear & Greed Q+A today

Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn speaks to Sean Aylmer about the bank's record full-year profit, and why 2026 could be remembered as a difficult year:

 

“You can definitely feel the pressures building in households as rates have gone back to the levels that they were at the peak of the rate hiking cycle. Numbers of customers requiring financial assistance are still down year on year, but they're up versus December. And so what we generally see is just pressures building across the household sector.

 

Even though the proportion of people who are behind on their loan repayments is well less than one per cent, that actually probably underestimates at times the pressures that I think many households are feeling, particularly with higher inflation. A lot of things are much more expensive than they were five years ago. Rates are clearly higher than they typically have been, and unfortunately those effects are felt unevenly across the economy.”

News in brief

Opposition housing spokesman Andrew Bragg says he’s prepared to fight One Nation on its policy positions, and confirmed a Coalition government would target annual net overseas migration under 180,000 people and would be linked to housing completions.

There has been a 37 per cent jump in small and medium-size business exits – either via formal insolvency or choosing to shut the doors voluntarily – over the past year.

Suncorp Group will pay its shareholders a 10 cent per share fully franked special dividend and buy back up to a further $250 million of its shares after announcing a net profit of just over $1 billion.

Pakistan’s defence minister says the US and Iran are “close to some sort of arrangement” over the Strait of Hormuz, even after both sides appeared to toughen their positions in the long-deadlocked negotiations.

The heatwaves engulfing Europe and parts of Asia are triggering some very inventive responses, as people develop new, air-conditioned clothing to cool down.

Fear-o-meter

One of the highlights from Commonwealth Bank annual results is the insight into the size and breadth of the lender. One-in-three retail customers and one-in-four businesses put CBA as their primary financial institution.

It has 790,000 direct shareholders, though its performance matters indirectly to 14 million people who hold superannuation accounts.

It also has more than 9.6 million app users and 14.3 million daily logins. That is a lot of data to make sense of.

The bank makes about $66 billion in income from charging interest. They pay out about $40 billion, including $22 billion to Australian savers. That means net interest income is $26 billion.

In Australia CommBank has about $680 billion in home loans and more than 60 per cent are to 35-54 year olds.

The country’s second biggest company has 52,000 staff and an effective corporate tax rate of 30pc.

And for anyone frustrated with using chatbots – you are becoming rarer. 86 per cent of customer conversations initiated through the bank’s agentic chatbot are successfully resolved without human assistance.

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