WestPac has resurrected the Bank of Melbourne brand, opening 40 branches and more than 100 ATMs across the state of Victoria.
WestPac acquired Bank of Melbourne in 1997 and continued to use the name until five years ago. It's now brought BoM back, re-branding branches in the region that had previously gone under the St George name - a more recent WestPac acquisition.
Over the next four years, BoM CEO Scott Tanner plans to add 85 new branches and 200 ATMs and has vowed to use best-in-class technology to make banking quicker and easier.
"Bank of Melbourne fills a big gap in the Victorian market, that gap is the need for a truly local bank and I am very proud to say that we can now deliver this to customers," says Tanner.
However, the launch was partly overshadowed by yet another IT failure at WestPac, which saw a payments processing glitch leave people without salaries and benefits payments.
According to local press reports, the glitch affected a batch of payments from WestPac accounts to ANZ, CBA and NAB on Monday night, with the knock on effect hitting more users.
The bank has been working to catch up and says it expects all accounts to be credited by the end of today. Cash machines, point-of-sales terminals and online and telephone banking were all unaffected.
In May WestPac was forced to apologise to customers after an air-conditioning fault at a data centre hit the bank's online service and shut down ATM and eftpos facilities across the country.
Its rivals have fared no better, with NAB and CBA both hit by several outages and payments glitches in the last year.