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.
