The question you should really be asking is "where to from here?"
The short answer is that you only need to look at the tech investment CBA is doing to know where CBA is heading. In this day and age information is money and in certain aspects is the most valuable commodity there is. Australia's population is 25.79 million, CBA serves 15.9 million customers, employs 48,900 people and has more than 800,000 shareholders. With a lion share of the Australia's population dynamically involved with CBA on a day to day basis. CBA has more information than what to do with it.
But that is about to change... The hardest thing to figure out in the world of business is knowing what your customers needs. Can you imagine a company that can accurately gauge spending habits, what people are transacting on, the shares they buy, know where the money is flowing geographically in real time etc... the applications of answering these simple questions alone gives CBA a window on what services they need to offer, where and when. The "How" is already right there all we need to do is dig the information up. There in lies CBA's future... we are currently in the services industry, CBA should really be in the mining industry. Not literally of course, we should be mining data (not on individual customers, that's illegal) but on trends, on money flow, on credit worthiness, on underwriting, on systemic risk, on privacy and on trust etc... and you know what the best part about this business model is? Traditional miners have a limited life of mine, at a certain point a mine is exhausted, CBAs mining business model does not exhaust as long as we have the lions share of customers.
If you are a CBA shareholder I really urge you to read these CBA tech whitepapers. It will give you a very different perspective on CBA away from the traditional bank that you think it is..
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https://www.commbank.com.au/content/dam/caas/newsroom/docs/The-future-of-digital-banking-KPMG-CBA-report.pdf
- https://www.commbank.com.au/content/dam/caas/newsroom/docs/Commbank-Whitepaper-Machine-to-Machine-economy.pdfI've held CBA for 20+ years. With a vision like this then I'm more than happy to buy and hold CBA for another 20. Hell, even if CBA can implement half of what is envisioned technologically on these papers then it will still be an absolute accomplishment.
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