money with a mission.
get the app
Start investing in what matters. Available on iOS and Android.
$10/month. No lock-in. Cancel anytime.
$30 billion in combined profit. $57 billion in fossil fuel lending since Paris. a royal commission that found fees charged to dead people. here's what nobody's reading.
Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, NAB, and ANZ. Four banks that between them hold approximately $4.5 trillion in total assets and control roughly 75% of all Australian household deposits.
In FY2024, the Big 4 reported combined cash profits of approximately $30.1 billion. Australia has 26 million people. Per capita, Australian banks extract more profit from their customers than almost any comparable system on earth.
Australian banks are regulated by APRA. Australia's banking system survived the 2008 GFC without a single bank failure. The Financial Claims Scheme guarantees deposits up to $250,000 per person per ADI.
Digital banking is genuinely good. Real-time payments via the New Payments Platform, PayID, instant transfers. CBA's app consistently ranks among the best globally.
Under fractional reserve banking, your bank lends out roughly 70-80 cents of every dollar deposited. Mostly into home loans (60-65% of domestic loan books). The rest goes to business lending, commercial property, infrastructure, agriculture, and resource extraction.
When a bank provides a $2 billion project finance facility to a new gas field, the capital backing those loans includes your deposits. Your savings account is part of the system that funds these projects.
Since the Paris Agreement in 2015, Australia's Big 4 banks have provided approximately $57 billion in lending and underwriting to fossil fuel companies, according to Market Forces.
Australia is the world's second-largest coal exporter. The Big 4 are the primary domestic financiers of that industry. When your savings sit in a Big 4 account earning 0.01% interest, part of the lending capacity those deposits create is directed toward projects incompatible with the climate targets Australia signed up to in Paris.
The headline savings rate at a Big 4 bank is often 0.01% to 0.10%. The RBA cash rate sits at 4.10%. The gap is the net interest margin, averaging 1.7-1.9% for the Big 4. That margin is your invisible fee.
Neobanks like Up and ING Australia offer no monthly fees, no international transaction fees, and savings rates 2-4 percentage points higher.
Commissioner Kenneth Hayne's final report in 2019 found systemic misconduct: fees charged to dead people, advice from unlicensed advisers, "fees for no service" totalling over $5 billion in remediation.
CBA paid a $700 million AUSTRAC penalty for 23,000+ AML breaches. Westpac paid $1.3 billion for 23 million breaches, including failures to report transactions linked to child exploitation.
Your deposits are safe in the regulatory sense. APRA oversight is real. The deposit guarantee is real. But your deposits are also part of a lending pool that finances fossil fuel extraction, charges you invisible margins, and was built by institutions that charged dead customers for financial advice until a Royal Commission made them stop.
Alternatives exist. Bank Australia is customer-owned and publishes a responsible banking policy excluding fossil fuels. Credit unions and mutual banks are APRA-regulated with the same $250K guarantee.
The Big 4 aren't evil. They're rational profit-maximising institutions doing exactly what their structure rewards them for doing. The question is whether those defaults align with what you'd choose if someone actually showed you the fine print.
ready to put this into practice?
Impact investing for $10/month. Five themes. One app. ASIC registered.