Current Services

For regional Australia customers, you'll find the online banking from Bendigo Bank suitable for most of your needs. There is a business section incorporated into its site with a range of financial services available.

You can access all your Bendigo Bank accounts, check balances and view historical transactions. You can transfer funds between you accounts, and pay anyone at another Australian bank. For transfers, you can set up scheduled transfers for those recurring payments.

Pay anyone is limited to either AU$1,000 or $5,000 and there is feedback on screen for how much is left, and small business can request an increase. Unfortunately, you can't store payees, or set up batched payments - this limits its usefulness.

Searches allow you to find transactions within a date range, dollar value range or reference number, however, you can't search for transaction types, which would be useful. You can get access to a minimum of 11 months' history, mainly based on Bendigo's movement to an online service.

BPay is also available for one-off or scheduled payments.

Like the other banks, you can order statements, chequebooks, and send secure e-mails to the bank.

Bendigo Bank also offers notification services for when your balance falls below, or rises above specific amounts. Notification is by fax or e-mail.

Unfortunately, you can't export your details to your own finance package.

Future Directions

Bendigo Bank plans to consolidate Pay Anyone, BPay, and transfers into a single process to simplify things for customers. There will also be support for multiple signature accounts, where both or more have to sign. In addition, file downloading to MYOB, QuickBooks and CSV formats will be supported, as well as payroll file uploading. Share Trading will also be introduced.

Usability

The system was fairly slow, even with an ISDN connection. Although the other banks also use an encrypted connection, this was noticeably slower.

When paying bills, there's no indication of your account balance, to check you have enough funds. You need to go back to the account balance area, and then back to BPay.

Seeing your transactions is a three click process, rather than giving you quick access to what you need most frequently - the last month's transactions.

The schedule transactions function is limited to a single future payment, or monthly. There is no option for a weekly, quarterly, six monthly, or annual frequencies of payments.

The steps to send an e-mail were not immediately obvious, and took us a few moments to work out.

Conclusion

A solid offering, with a simple interface but could be improved by some shortcuts, and saving regular payees. Customers in rural settings will get most of what they want, especially for multiple signatures.

Rating 3 / 5.

ZDNet's e-banking special report compares the online offerings of Australia' s leading banks.

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