Matt Comyn

Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Matt Comyn is Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the largest of the country’s Big Four banks and its most valuable listed company. He has held the role since 9 April 2018 and has spent essentially his whole career inside the institution, holding senior leadership positions there since 2000. He was promoted into the job at the worst possible moment: CBA was facing AUSTRAC money-laundering proceedings and the Hayne Royal Commission into misconduct in banking, and his predecessor Ian Narev had been pushed towards an early exit. Comyn’s tenure has been defined by the remediation that followed, by a heavy bet on digital and mobile banking built on his earlier work running CommSec, and by the bank’s position as the dominant retail lender in a highly concentrated market.

Career Highlights

• Appointed Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Commonwealth Bank of Australia on 9 April 2018, succeeding Ian Narev.
• Managing Director of CommSec, the bank’s major digital business, from 2006 to 2010, where he modernised the technology infrastructure and grew market share.
• Group Executive, Retail Banking Services from 2012 to 2018, running the bank’s largest operating division.
• Brought back into a chief-executive-track role after a short 2010 departure to lead Morgan Stanley Smith Barney’s Australian business.
• Director of the Business Council of Australia and of the Financial Markets Foundation for Children.
• Completed the General Management Program at Harvard Business School alongside degrees from UNSW and the University of Sydney.
• At CBA’s October 2025 annual general meeting, chair Paul O’Malley publicly signalled the board’s intention that Comyn continue as chief executive until at least 2028.

Professional Journey

Comyn has held senior leadership roles at Commonwealth Bank since 2000, covering business, institutional, retail and wealth management. The step that made his name was CommSec. He took over the bank’s online broking arm as Managing Director in 2006, at an unusually young age, and ran it through both the pre-crisis bull market and the global financial crisis, rebuilding its technology platform and increasing market share through a period when discount broking was being commoditised. That combination – a large retail customer base, a digital delivery model and a technology rebuild – became the template for the rest of his career.

In 2010 he left briefly to become Chief Executive Officer, Australia at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, then returned to CBA, where he ran Local Business Banking before being appointed Group Executive of Retail Banking Services in 2012. Retail is the bank’s largest operating division and the source of the majority of its profit, and the role put him in charge of CBA’s consumer digital products through the years in which the CommBank app became the bank’s principal channel.

He was appointed Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer on 9 April 2018. The timing mattered: CBA was then the most exposed of the major banks, facing civil proceedings brought by AUSTRAC over anti-money-laundering reporting failures and about to be examined by the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry. Comyn’s early agenda was accordingly remediation and simplification – strengthening risk management, divesting peripheral businesses and narrowing the group back towards core banking – rather than expansion.

By the bank’s October 2025 annual general meeting he had been in the chair for more than seven years, and chair Paul O’Malley used that meeting to signal the board’s intention that Comyn remain chief executive until at least 2028, indicating that a formal search for a successor would only begin after O’Malley’s own board term concluded and that the appointment would fall to a board led by the next chair. That is an expression of board intent rather than a fixed term, but it is an unusually explicit one. As of September 2026 he remains in post.

Education

University of New South Wales

Bachelor of Arts

University of New South Wales

Master of Commerce

University of Sydney

Executive Master of Business Administration

He has also completed the General Management Program at Harvard Business School, which is executive education rather than a degree.