CBA launches next phase of customer recovery support

Following the start of an intensive three month check-in with affected customers about their individual financial positions, many retail and business customers have resumed paying in full or in part their loans which were placed in deferral at the start of the pandemic.

As more customers restart their loan repayments, CBA will target its support to those people who most need it.

This move is underpinned by a new agreement with the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), which will allow customers to keep their loans in deferral for up to a further four months, on a case by case basis depending on their individual circumstances. The additional deferral will also have no impact on a customer’s credit report or their credit rating.

CBA Chief Executive Officer Matt Comyn said: “We are committed to continuing our industry leading support for customers and businesses to help them get back on their feet and inject vital financial stimulus into the Australian economy.

“While many customers are doing better than we expected, we know that some customers will require further support and we will contact them over the coming months to discuss the options that might be available to them.

“To date, our coronavirus measures since March 2020 have provided about $15 billion in direct financial support to customers and stimulus for the economy. Supporting customers who continue to experience financial difficulty is a priority and we are tailoring our support to make sure each customer gets the advice and assistance that suits them.”

Since the beginning of the pandemic, CBA brand has provided loan repayment deferrals to almost 130,000 home loans and supported 100,000 business customers. The bank’s financial support has reached over $15 billion to business and retail customers, including through:

• $9 billion of support to ~100,000 businesses
• Repayment deferral requests on ~260,000 loans
• Home loan repayments reduced to minimum – releasing up to $3.6 billion to Australian households
• Approved over $760 million of new lending from over 8,400 applications under Government’s SME Guarantee Scheme

Customers aiming to restart home loan repayments can choose to make minimum repayments, switch to interest-only payments for a specified period or fix some or all of their loan to an all-time low of 2.29% for 1, 2 and 3 years.

CBA has also more than doubled the size of its Financial Assistance Solutions team to about 1,500 frontline staff to have conversations with our retail customers experiencing hardship. The bank is also using its unique machine learning technology to identify individual customers in hardship and direct its support where it is most needed.

“This next phase of our support reinforces the strong collaboration and effective cooperation between federal and state governments, regulators and the banking industry which has allowed so much to be achieved in such a short time,” said Mr Comyn.