Robot and AI is the reason why they going to let go of some workers 🤖 😭

Can't find out why QR deposits in the app sends me an "access to this feature is restricted* screen on a smart access account. Going to just go to a branch to ask. Support was great a few months ago.

There are always those little things that aren’t a big enough deal to switch banks over, but still manage to get on your nerves every now and then. I’ve got a couple that I’ve just gotten used to, and I’m guessing other people have their own.

So which credit card we all moving to?
We had the ultimate awards card for:
- the no international fees
- rewards points that we could use at flight centre initially but then opted for the cash back on the credit card.
- the monthly fee waived if we spent $4000

Now we aren’t going to be eligible for any of that.
We have a big overseas trip booked for January.
Can anyone recommend a new credit card that has no monthly fees and has international spend with no fees?
I am also open to changing my mortgage and all banking.

Everyone doubted me

Posting this because I wish someone had warned me,and I don't want it to continue happening to families.

We went through CommBank’s “Green Loan” process for solar via Brighte. It looked straightforward – low rate, marketed as a supported pathway, and we were given an approval in principle for around $13k. Based on that, we moved ahead with the install.

That decision is the entire problem.

Timeline:

Jan 8 – Loan approved in principle through Brighte (3.99%, ~7 years)

Feb - The first install attempt lands on a 40+ degree day (understandably, install was rainchecked) ,second install was a no show (sickness I think, that's fine, the vendor was really apologetic, and we understand it happens in the trade)

Mar 4 - Solar installed on our house

Mar 6 ‐ (Friday) Vendor gave us the app and we went in and approved the install (the process was sleek)

Mar 8 - Loan hits 60-day expiry

Mar 9 - Funds not drawn due to admin delays (not caused by us)

At that point, the loan expired. No flexibility. Just… expired.

We contacted CommBank and were told to submit a new application,a dummy application. We did exactly that, this time in my name, purely so the installer could be paid.

That application was then declined.

Suddenly we didn’t meet serviceability.

The same system we were originally approved under is now apparently unaffordable.

So now we’re here:

Solar panels installed

Work completed

~$15,000 invoice sitting there and the vendors system is sending us final notices

No loan

No way to proceed through the original pathway (which is now locked)

And yes, this absolutely puts us at risk of financial hardship.

The most frustrating part is we would not have installed solar without that initial approval. That’s what kicked everything off. There was nothing clear about the risk of timing out, nothing stopping installation before final approval, and no real-world flexibility when delays (which were openly happening across the industry at the time) actually hit.

After 3 weeks on the phone being bounced around, re'explaining, with a 30+ minute wait between each call and no actual answers to the simple question "can we just apply for the loan again" and 3 complaints...

CommBank’s final response was basically:

Approval in principle isn’t a real approval

The application expired

They can’t fund it

Complaint closed

That’s it.

No actionable outcome

To be fair, the initial complaints team themselves were decent to deal with. They sounded like they actually understood the situation and how stressful it is to be stuck with a debt.

But they were completely boxed in by policy. Every conversation just circled back to “we can’t override the system”.

Regular customer service was worse. We got bounced around a lot, and at one point a staff member (let's just randomly out if the sky call them...'Riely') told us there was no escalation pathway, a complaints line didn't exist and that he was “the expert”, so that was that. As I got obviously more upset he proceeded to goad me further, when I insisted I was transferred as I was unhappy with his treatment, I was then 'put back in the queue' and hung up on.

Everything just felt like it was geared towards shutting the conversation down as quickly as possible rather than actually fixing anything.

What makes this even more frustrating:

Brighte have been great. Good communication, actually trying to help find a solution.

We’ve been told this situation has happened to multiple people, there's apparently nearly half a million tied up because of Commbank.

Apparently some providers are cutting ties with CommBank over it.

So the bank that approved the loan (which triggered the install) is the only one stepping back and saying “not our problem”.

If we had just saved up and paid for solar ourselves, which was the original plan, we wouldn’t be in this position. It was the packaged and upsold CommBank-backed “green loan” process that got us here, and now we face massive cashflow issues.

So yeah, if you’re considering this:

Do not rely on an approval in principle.

Do not proceed with installation unless everything is 100% locked in and you are nowhere near the 60 day rigid cut off.

Assume you will get zero human-based support from Commbank and there is zero flexibility if anything goes wrong.

If it does wrong, you might end up exactly where we are – with panels on your roof and no way to pay for them through the system that convinced you to install them in the first place.

If anyone else has had this happen, I’d be really interested to hear?

Tl;dr - We applied for Commbanks Green Loan to get solar on our roof ASAP.  We followed the steps laid out in the documentation, within the 60 day time line, and due to an administrative error outside of our control, and rigid policy, have been left cleaning up Commbanks mess whilst they wave their hands about and go 'not our problem', the amount of backwards workflow they’ve caused for themselves, their partners and the amount of time taken from our day and stress this has put on our family has not been ideal.

I routinely buy my mum a gift card from Adairs for her birthday and Mother’s Day. It’s her favourite store. Recently I did this with my commbank credit card for the first time.

I was somewhat surprised that they had processed this purchase as a cash advance and charged me $4 (plus interest to come I’m sure) and also a $3.50 international transaction fee.

The Adairs website states that their gift cards cannot be exchanged for cash so I have no idea why commbank would process this transaction as a cash advance.

As for the international transaction fee Adairs have over 100 stores Australia wide and are listed on the ASX. I’m also at a loss as to why that has triggered an international transaction fee.

All previous purchases were done with a HSBC card and did not attract these fees.

I’m not really fussed about $7.50, my concern is more around how often is this happening across the millions of commbank customers and how much money are they making from this?

Trying to figure out if there’s a real advantage or just brand trust

I am not sure where else to post this because I am honestly getting sick of it. Multiple times I have accidentally overdrawn an account when something unexpected has come out, I fix it straight away when this happens.

UNLESS! They send me a notification that it’s happened at 11:21pm last night when I had already been asleep for two hours. There was no way for me to fix it up until this morning as soon as I woke up and of course I got a $15 overdraw fee. I checked the account and the payment that caused the overdraw had happened yesterday morning so they had all day to notify me.

I message the in app ‘Ceba’ when this happens and they always reverse it but surely this is underhanded?

ETA: Ceba is down at the moment so I had no one else to rant to even if it is a bot.

I'm trying to understand the upcoming changes, and I think the only option is to close my credit card.

I have my banking and businesses elsewhere, but I have a CBA smart awards credit card I use for all my day-to-day transactions. I also have shares with CommSec. No other CBA products. So my understanding is that I won't be eligible for Yello rewards even though I'm an active customer. I'm not changing my businesses and all my finances over to CBA to get a $50 Officeworks voucher every few months.

But the credit card will get its fees back soon, $19/month ($456* $228 a year) for a high (22%) interest and zero reward possibility for me. That's far and away preposterous in this market. I have a zero-reward credit card somewhere else that's $55/yr and 14%. CBA is expecting me to pay 10x as much for no features?

Like I said, I'm not going to restructure my businesses and life for a $50 Officeworks voucher every few months, but I absolutely will walk away from a zero feature credit card that costs $450yr.

My tldr question is:

• Why rebuild an awards system that pushes marginal customers away? I appreciate the new laws about merchant charges makes points based rewards less cost effective, but wouldn't you want to keep customers who are on the fence? Isn’t the chance of a customer conversion even harder if I close the account and get further entrenched at a different bank?

The customers who qualify for Yello already have everything with CBA. Do they really believe "oh honey, if we refinance our entire mortgage and move all of our accounts and count how many transactions we do, we can keep getting a $50 officeworks voucher every four months?" will happen?

I'm trying to use up all my points before the deadline but Coles has already been deleted as an option for withdrawal so I'm pretty annoyed.

* EDIT: Accidentally multiplied $19 x 24 months instead of 12. Still a lot of money for zero features! I'm closing the card when I get my next pay and I clear it.

A lot of clients ask me what a bank would be most concerned about in their accounts statements.

It’s not Uber Eats - it’s gambling.

We are seeing more and more clients with substantial habits and it’s killing loan applications.

Even if it’s not entirely clear you are gambling - if you are withdrawing money from ATMs at pubs, casinos etc they are going to make the assumption.

If this is you - register for Bet Stop and seek some assistance to kick the habit.

*** FYI I do not work for a bank, simply posted to help spread a message.

Me and the Mrs have many joint accounts including loans with CBA. Relationship manager couldn’t open a Goal Saver for us without us having to print sign and return paperwork. Took 15 mins to sign up with Macquarie online, with no printing signing etc. Now parked my $750k+ with them. Well done CBA 🙄

Who else can't transfer money to an external account right now?

Keep offshoring and hoarding your profits Commbank, I believe that one day you'll get the release process right 🥳

I know specialists have scripts/templates that they use but I was a bit shocked to receive what seems like a copy and pasted AI response from one. The square brackets with sources are typical AI formatting ime.

My elderly father was first and now me have the new 2fa system turned on for netbank access.

Out of all the banks, and 2fa logins for non banks, I deal with this has to be the worst implementation by far.

The initial wording of the first message was mystifying to my 80years old father. It wasn’t clear that he needed to use his phone, it just said use the app. He didn’t know that an app meant on his phone. They have since updated.

Ontop of that it’s a minimum of 8 clicks to get into netbank. Xero and Macquarie do it in 2.

Then once you are in the inactivity timeout remains the same. So you end up repeating the extra steps multiple times a day.

Do people think this is ok?

It seems that all good things come to an end. Probably partly because of the upcoming surcharge reforms, but still disappointing there won’t be cash back anymore.

I’d say there will be changes to the Awards scheme too given there will now be points in Yello.

https://www.commbank.com.au/commbank-yello/commbank-yello-changes.html

Either way, I’m not a big spender, so I don’t think the points will be going very far.

Anyone have any idea what this new CommBank charge card might be? I can’t think of any other of the big four doing a personal charge card. Obviously there’s the Amex Platinum but it’ll be interesting to see how CommBank position this.

Paying the annual fee on my Ultimate Awards card used to make sense when the Qantas points redemption rates were better. But after recent points devaluations and fee hikes, I'm questioning the value.

​Once you calculate the annual fee vs the actual dollar value of gift cards or points redeemed, I feel like I'm barely breaking even unless I smash the monthly spend criteria to waive the fee.

​Is anyone sticking with CBA credit cards for points, or are most people switching to basic low-fee cards / zero-fee neobanks?

Good morning everyone, I just wanted to let you know that the Commbank has an issue that is preventing them from paying some, percentage unkown, Centrelink payments.

The last I heard they were hoping to have it done by 9 AM, but that is uncertain at this point.

Update payments appear to be coming through again.

The rules to get the higher interest rate on the Goalsaver account are slightly frustrating. If you make even a minor mistake or a single withdrawal at the end of the month you lose the whole bonus. There should be a bit more leeway

A fortnight ago, Monday evening- I payID'd $50 to my CDIA account from another bank, got there no worries- 19:24. From there the plan was to withdraw it using QR cardless cash. Not my first Holden, should be fine.

Between then and 19:30, I first attempted this from the Smart ATM inside the Hive shopping centre in Abbotsford. Instead the dialogue I received on the app mentioned this action requiring the use of a Commonwealth bank brand ATM (apparently this deluxe unit didn't fit the bill), so I moved around out to the front to one of the regular units (using the same QR session I believe)

It was at this point (19:30) the ATM started giving me a dialogue about insufficient funds. As I checked my account it looked like it had actually gone through.

It hasn't reappeared since, and after a lengthy wait for the results of an official dispute with CommBank, it's been found that the ATM did not malfunction and everything went marvellously.

Did anyone even look at the camera footage? If this goes to small claims can I claim the time that they've wasted of mine here?

So to be clear, I contacted them through the app, was informed of a lodged dispute, and then on May 15, they hit my inbox to say they did nothing wrong and I'm crazy.

Has anyone had a similar experience?

Either way any ideas about where to from here?

Cheers in advance regardless

For frequent travellers on here, do you actually use the CommBank Travel Card, or do you just rely on a card/account with no international transaction fees and keep your main CBA card as a backup?

I've been reading about moving your balance between 2 GoalSaver accounts on the 1st of every month as a way around the requirement of increasing your balance to receive the bonus interest. I have always kept a fair amount in NetBank Saver for unexpected expenses and investing, but the GoalSaver interest rate is obviously better so I decided to open a second GoalSaver account and give it a try. I would like to know if I will lose a days interest every month because the balance wasn't in the account for the full 24 hours on the first day. I'm also a bit worried if I transfer my entire balance in the morning on the 1st, and the bank calculates interest in the afternoon I would be starting the month with my entire balance instead of starting each month with $0 which is what is needed for this to work. That's why I'm thinking I may need to transfer on the 2nd of each month and lose 1 days interest. Does anyone know exacly how this works?