ANZ
Current Services
The ANZ Web site has a dedicated section for small business. Of all the banks, ANZ appeared to be the most serious in servicing this sector of the banking market. The intention of the bank is to make banking easier for the SME, get them online, and reduce their paperwork load.
ANZ provides discounted Gateway PCs, as well as online tools for building yourself a Web site, GST payment accounts and business benchmarking tools. It also provides procurement services and eGate for merchants, as well as a rural focus.
In terms of functionality, you can transfer between your accounts, pay anyone at another Australian bank and make schedule payments. You can make multiple payments (five at a time), as well as pay five bills at a time. Unfortunately, you can't save these multiple payment groups for future use (e.g. as salary payments), or make ad-hoc multiple payment - you need to add them to your payee list first. The pay anyone function quickly allows single ad-hoc payments, and an option to save the new payee to your list.
You can quickly view your past transfers and perform cheque reconciliation. As with the other banks, there is also a secure e-mail facility. For transaction history, you can view up to 120 days' worth.
You can also download your recent transactions into Quicken and Microsoft Money, and view your interest history.
You can personalise the Internet banking, such as changing the session time out between five and 15 minutes, in case you leave your PC unattended, changing the order of the accounts, and renaming the accounts to something meaningful.
Future Services
ANZ describes their services as being in the early stages. Upcoming changes include: increasing pay anyone limit from $1,000 or $5,000 to $10,000 for personal customers and from $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 to $15,000 and $25,000 for business customers. They have also promised some significant enhancements in the very near future.
Usability
In general, this interface was very well put together. It's clear and simple, with a good look and feel. Your account balance(s) are always present on the screen below the left hand navigation.
There were a couple of minor issues when entering dates, such as 10/11/00 would not be automatically expanded to 10/11/2000, rather we got an error and had to fix it ourselves.
For viewing transactions, a couple of semantic issues meant that the 'last seven days transactions' does not include the current day, while the 'last five transactions for today' option would not include the 6th or more transaction made today.
While you can update most of your personal details online, changing your phone number and address requires a secure e-mail to be sent to the bank.
The system was also a little slow, even over a 56k modem. ANZ provides support for Macintosh customers.
Conclusion
If you're looking to get online, then you can't go past the ANZ. They're clearly ahead of the others with an offering including website development and a discounted PC offer.
Rating 4/5.
A big problem delaying greater use of all forms of electronic banking is a valid distrust of banks. A number of times I have needed to change banks because the bank has discontinued a service, made a service uneconomic or broken their promise to me. Banks breaking their promises of a frequent problem. The managers who make offers and promises to you have no discretion to keep the promise when Head Office changes the rules.
When you have to change banks it creates big problems if you have organised direct payments into your account for dividend and investment receipts. Before you can change banks you have a huge list of people you have to advise your new account well in advance and then some are still going to go to the old account. In the end it is so much easier and safer to simply get paid by cheque and refuse the requests for direct payment.
What is needed is a reverse BPay where a payee can give payors a code. That code goes to a web table that I can update. Each time that someone has to make a payment to me they download the current bank details from that secure site. When I wish to change my bank I only have to change that one web table for all my payments to go to the new account.