CBA sued for overcharging tens of thousands of businesses
The corporate regulator is suing the Commonwealth Bank for allegedly overcharging tens of thousands of business customers – many of them small businesses – millions of dollars in fees they were never told about.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has commenced civil penalty proceedings against the nation’s biggest bank, alleging that CBA’s terms and conditions for its CommBiz online banking platform were misleading because they failed to clearly and accurately disclose all the fees that customers would be charged for direct debit and direct credit payments.
The lawsuit, announced on Thursday, alleges that about 42,000 businesses banking with CBA were collectively overcharged about $8.5 million in fees between November 2020 and May 2025. The Bank has since said the fee in question was 25 cents plus GST.
ASIC claims the misleading terms have been in place since CommBiz was launched in 2006, and that CBA did nothing to rectify the issue despite receiving complaints in 2015 and identifying the overcharging during an internal audit in 2016.
While customers were told they would be charged a fee for a payment to or from a third-party account, ASIC alleges CBA “also charged an additional, undisclosed fee for the corresponding movement of money into or out of the customer’s CommBiz account”.
“For example, a small business paying the fortnightly wages of 10 employees from two CommBiz accounts was charged 12 fees: 10 for the payments to its employees and another two undisclosed fees for the money being withdrawn from its own accounts,” ASIC said in a media statement.
‘What makes this particularly concerning is how long the alleged conduct went on, despite customer complaints to Commonwealth Bank pointing to a problem years earlier.’
ASIC commissioner Alan Kirkland
ASIC commissioner Alan Kirkland said the alleged conduct represented a failure of basic banking over many years.
“We allege Commonwealth Bank broke a basic promise to its business customers, many of them small businesses, that the fees it told them they would pay were the fees they would actually be charged,” he said.
“Small businesses are busy enough. They should not have to scrutinise every transaction to make sure that their bank is charging them the right fees,” Kirkland said.
ASIC is also alleging governance failures at CBA due to its inability to detect and correct the issue, and that CBA “allegedly failed to act efficiently, honestly and fairly”.
“What makes this particularly concerning is how long the alleged conduct went on, despite customer complaints to Commonwealth Bank pointing to a problem years earlier,” Kirkland said.
CBA said the relevant fee at the centre of the allegations was 25 cents, plus GST.
“While CBA charged the fee consistently over time, the issue arose from changes made to certain terms and conditions intended to simplify them, which did not accurately reflect the fee charging method,” the bank said in a statement to the ASX.
The bank said it self-identified and reported the matter to ASIC, and had already begun rectification steps as well as remediating affected customers. As of 20 October, the median remediation payment made was about $85, while the mean payment was about $442, including interest, it said.
“While CBA accepts that it did not get things right for CommBiz customers and apologises to all customers impacted by this matter, CBA does not accept the way that some of the allegations have been formulated. It therefore expects to defend certain aspects of the claim, or otherwise continue to engage with ASIC to efficiently resolve the proceedings,” it said.
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