PRESS RELEASE: ANZ customers lose their services to pay for Shayne Elliott’s digital incompetence

Only a public post office People’s Bank will force the banking cartel to again serve their customers—or risk losing them.
As the Australian Citizens Party (ACP) has tirelessly exposed—and opposed—the Big Four banks have gutted customer service to maximise profits from digital banking.
They have withdrawn face-to-face branch services and cash access from thousands of communities.
They have also aggressively phased out cheques ahead of the planned end of cheque use by 2028, which Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced in 2023.
(This announcement by Chalmers was based on a lie by Anna Bligh’s Australian Banking Association, which claimed that cheque use has plunged since 2007 from 1 per cent of payments to 0.2 per cent today. That percentage may be correct, but the real story is that the total number of payments has skyrocketed, so while the percentage of payments by cheque has declined, the number of cheques written each month has actually held steady since 2007 at around 2 million. The banks don’t care about inconveniencing these people; they just want to save the costs of processing cheques and increase the pressure to go digital. Sign the Change.org petition to oppose the cheque phase-out here: https://chng.it/xvRFnSL2F4)
ANZ is perhaps the most aggressive of the Big Four cartel banks in forcing its customers to go digital:
• It has closed the highest percentage of branches—42 per cent under CEO Shayne Elliott;
• It has most aggressively phased out cheques;
• It has converted almost half of its remaining branches to “cashless” offices (without dispensing cash they no longer meet the legal definition of a branch), raising the question as to whether it should even be considered a bank anymore; and
• It hasn’t joined Bank@Post, so ANZ customers don’t even have the option of basic cash access from their accounts through post offices when they lose their branch.
One of the reasons ANZ has so aggressively withdrawn services has been to pay for its new digital banking platform ANZ Plus, which is costing it $400 million per year—but it still isn’t working.
ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott has spent $1.5 billion on ANZ Plus since 2020—three times the annual cost of the 287 branches he has closed to force customers to go digital.
The goal is to have a fully digital bank from which ANZ’s management and mostly foreign shareholders can sit back and suck in pure profits without having to pay the inconvenient expenses of the $1.7 million per year to maintain each physical branch, or staff salaries.
Australian customers are suffering for Shayne Elliott’s dream, especially the older customers who have been loyal to ANZ their whole lives but are now seen by the banks as an obstacle to their digital dream.
According to the Australian Financial Review, at a briefing on Monday by ANZ group executive for retail banking Maile Carnegie, analysts frustrated by the delays in ANZ Plus succeeding “questioned whether it might take longer than expected to move a ‘rump’ of older ANZ customers—who favour using cash and branches over smartphone apps—onto Plus, delaying the realisation of cost savings from decommissioning the legacy systems”.
That’s the contempt with which the banking sector now holds the elderly loyal customers who helped turn the Big Four into banking giants.
ACP Research Director and Senate candidate for Victoria Robert Barwick—the only person to attend every hearing of the Senate inquiry into bank closures in regional Australia—said today ANZ and the other Big Four banks won’t stop abusing their customers until they’re forced to compete with a public post office bank.