Matt FarnhamTrust is one of those words marketers use until it starts to sound soft.
Every bank wants to be trusted. Every bank says it puts customers first. Every bank talks about safety, service and reliability. Most of it sounds fine. Very little of it means much until there is behaviour behind it.
That is why Commonwealth Bank’s recent trust recovery is worth looking at properly.
Not because CBA has suddenly become a perfect brand. Not because Australians have forgotten the Royal Commission. And not because a higher trust ranking automatically proves a commercial result. CBA rebuilt trust in a period where some of its most trust-sensitive commercial indicators also moved in the right direction: deposits, deposit share, deposit funding and lending growth above system.
That is where trust starts to look less like a soft reputation measure and more like a commercial asset. I’ve also written about how trust is now one of the signals that AI Search looks for when deciding which brands to surface.
CBA moved back into trusted territory
Roy Morgan named Commonwealth Bank its Most Trusted Brand in Banking for 2025. In its November 2025 banking and finance trust update, Roy Morgan reported that CBA had risen six places year on year to reach 7th overall, its highest ranking at that point.
That is a significant movement for a big four bank, especially given the recent history of banking trust in Australia. CBA had been pushed into Roy Morgan’s higher-risk distrust zones after the Royal Commission. So this was not just a brand moving up a league table from a neutral position. It was a large incumbent rebuilding belief after a period where many Australians had reason to question the category.
The rise continued. In Roy Morgan’s March 2026 update, CBA was ranked 4th overall, behind Bunnings, Aldi and Kmart, and ahead of Apple.
That does not prove commercial causation on its own. A trust ranking is not on a P&L sheet. But it does tell us something important: the way Australians were evaluating CBA had changed.
But what did CBA do to improve Trust in the brand?
CBA made safety measurable
One of the clearest parts of CBA’s trust story is that they invested heavily in safety. In FY25, CBA said it invested more than $900 million to protect customers from fraud, scams, cyber threats and financial crime. It also reported that customer scam losses had fallen by more than 76% from their peak.
That is not “we care about customers” language. It is a specific customer fear, backed by a specific business response, with a specific outcome.
Scams are one of the most immediate trust issues in banking, a whopping $2.18 billion in scam losses were reported in 2025. People understand the risk. They understand the anxiety. They understand the moment of checking an account and hoping nothing has gone wrong.
So when CBA talks about safety, it can point to something more concrete than brand sentiment. It can point to investment. It can point to lower customer scam losses. It can point to work that is directly connected to whether people feel safe leaving money with the bank.
That is important because trust in banking is rarely built by a single message. It is built by reducing the number of reasons people have to worry.
The commercial result showed up where trust matters most
The strongest evidence of trust doing commercial work is in deposits and lending portfolio growth
CBA reported 26% household deposit market share at June 2025, rising to 27% at December 2025. That is an actual share gain in one of the clearest trust-sensitive areas of banking: where people choose to leave their money. Customer deposits also grew from $874 billion in December 2024 to $956 billion in December 2025. At the same time, CBA’s deposit funding increased from 78% in June 2025 to 79% in December 2025.
Lending also moved in the right direction. CBA reported a 7 basis point gain in home loan market share in FY25. Then in 1H26, Reuters reported that CBA grew home lending volumes 3.7% and business lending volumes 6%, outpacing system growth in both. Reuters also described the result as being supported by market-share gains in home loans, business loans and deposits.
CBA did not just become more trusted in a survey. During the same period, more money flowed into customer deposits, household deposit share increased, deposit funding strengthened, and lending grew faster than system.
That does not mean trust alone caused those outcomes. It’s more complicated than that. Rates, products, service, distribution, digital experience, the broader economy and competitor activity all matter.
But it does show why trust should not be treated as a soft metric sitting somewhere away from commercial performance. In banking, trust can show up in where people put their money.
The memory side: CBA was already easy to credit
The Make it Unmistakable 2026 Report named Commonwealth Bank in Australia’s home-grown Top 10 unmistakable assets, alongside Bunnings, Westpac, Woolworths, Officeworks, Coles, Optus, Telstra, Qantas and the ABC. It also names the Commonwealth diamond as one of the primary shorthand codes shaped by years of consistent and systematic use.
The report does not just say brand assets are important. Its sharper point is attribution. It defines distinctiveness as the percentage of people who correctly attribute a brand asset, minus the percentage who misattribute it. In other words, the issue is not just whether people recognise something. It is whether they recognise it as yours.
That matters in this example because CBA’s trust-building work is not only about doing good things. It is also about whether people know who did them.
That is the useful link to CBA. Banking had a trust problem to rebuild, but it did not have to build recognition from scratch. The Commonwealth diamond, yellow, CommBank name, app icon, cards, branches, ATMs and customer communications have been repeated across everyday banking for years.
So when CBA invested in scam protection, talked about fraud prevention, improved digital safety tools or reported lower customer scam losses, that proof was sitting inside an already well-attributed brand system.
This is not a small advantage.
The Make it Unmistakable report talks about misattribution as a hidden cost in branding. If people see your asset and another brand comes to mind, you have effectively invested in someone else’s memory structures. For CBA, the risk is lower than it would be for a weaker or more generic banking brand because the Commonwealth diamond is already a strongly attributed shorthand code.
That is why this case is useful for thinking about trust and memory together.
CBA’s commercial trust story was not built on awareness alone. And it was not built on trust alone. It was a trusted recovery attached to a brand people could already correctly identify.
Memory gets a brand considered. Trust gets a brand chosen.
This is the bigger point.
Memory gets a brand considered. Trust gets a brand chosen.
A brand can be easy to remember and still not feel safe enough to choose. Another brand can feel credible once people know it, but fail to come to mind when the decision is being made.
The best brands do both.
CBA is a useful example because the evidence sits on both sides. Roy Morgan shows the trust recovery. The Make it Unmistakable report shows CBA has one of Australia’s strongest home-grown memory codes through the Commonwealth diamond. CBA’s own results show movement in trust-sensitive commercial indicators: household deposit share, customer deposits, deposit funding and lending growth above system.
The lesson for marketers
The lesson from CBA is not that every brand should try to copy CBA. Most brands do not have its scale, history, distribution, app penetration or decades of accumulated recognition.
Trust needs proof. Memory needs attribution.
If trust is only a claim, people will ignore it. If proof is not clearly branded, the value can leak into the category or to a competitor. If memory is strong but trust is weak, the brand may be considered and rejected. If trust is strong but memory is weak, the brand may never make the shortlist.
CBA’s recent performance is interesting because it shows what can happen when trust is rebuilt around visible customer proof and attached to a brand system people already know how to credit.
The result was not just a better trust ranking.
It was money movement. More deposits. Higher deposit share. Stronger deposit funding. Lending growth above system.
That is when trust starts to look like an asset.
Matt Farnham is an award-winning senior marketing leader with more than a decade of experience in brand, communications and customer engagement. His work has focused on helping organisations build trust, strengthen customer relationships and drive sustainable growth, particularly in highly regulated industries. In 2024, he was named Future Leader of the Year at the Australian Marketing Institute Marketing Excellence Awards. He writes about brand strategy, marketing effectiveness and customer behaviour at mattfarnham.au.
Sources
- Roy Morgan: Trust in banking and finance industries, including all big four banks, increases significantly over the last 12 months https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/10052-roy-morgan-trusted-industries-and-brands-in-banking-and-finance-october-2025
- Roy Morgan: Bunnings is Australia’s most trusted brand; OpenAI enters the top 20 most distrusted brands for the first time https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/10247-risk-monitor-quartely-update-march-2026
- Commonwealth Bank: 2025 Full Year Results Presentation https://www.commbank.com.au/content/dam/commbank-assets/investors/docs/results/fy25/full-year-profit-presentation.pdf
- Commonwealth Bank: 2026 Half Year Results Presentation https://www.commbank.com.au/content/dam/commbank-assets/investors/2026/CBA%202026%20Half%20Year%20Results%20Presentation.pdf
- Reuters: Australia’s CBA first-half earnings hit record on market share gains, shares surge https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/commonwealth-bank-australia-reports-6-rise-first-half-cash-earnings-2026-02-10/
- Principals and The Navigators: Make it Unmistakable 2026 Report https://www.principals.com.au/trend-presentation/make-it-unmistakable-2026-report/
- Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. (2026). Targeting Scams: Report of the National Anti-Scam Centre on scams activity 2025. Scamwatch. https://www.scamwatch.gov.au/research-and-resources/targeting-scams-report
