Commonwealth Bank

Commonwealth Bank is the big everyday bank most people meet through transaction accounts, cards, home loans, branches and a very busy app. By our assessment, it does the plain banking job well: payments, transfers, bill pay and mortgage handling are all central, and the scale of its branch-and-digital mix is its real strength. The trade-off is that a giant bank can feel standardised, with fees, policy checks and branch waits that are part of the package. In practice it is a broad service with a lot of moving parts, not a boutique place. Against smaller banks it has reach and product depth; against neobanks it has less novelty but far more infrastructure. Commonwealth Bank is the sort of bank people use when they want one place to do most ordinary money tasks, and the app is where much of that now happens.