The new agreement with Tyro will support the Bank's strategy of investing in capability and reducing complexity by providing more flexible, feature-rich payment solutions to business customers.

The Bank's existing merchant acquiring services are currently delivered through a range of third parties who provide various hardware and software components for its product. However, this new partnership will reduce the number of partners from seven to one.

Under the agreement, a new co-brand has been developed - Bendigo Bank EFTPOS/eCommerce powered by Tyro - to allow the Bank to offer Tyro's full suite of products to its business customers, grow its capability and improve the overall customer experience.

Bendigo Bank EFTPOS/eCommerce powered by Tyro fuses the Bank's strength of brand, partnering expertise, breadth of distribution channels, geographic footprint, and relationship-focused Business Banking capability, with Tyro’s extensive merchant acquiring technical expertise.

The new Bendigo Bank EFTPOS/eCommerce powered by the Tyro offering is expected to be progressively deployed to Bendigo Bank merchants from the first half of 2021. Bendigo Bank will continue to provide all other banking services to these customers.

This announcement is not a material financial transaction for Bendigo Bank but will remove the requirement for ongoing capital investment in a specialised market and deliver positive earnings contribution and growth opportunities.

As part of the announcement, Tyro will also establish a new Bendigo-based presence, which will in turn, further diversify the level of technical expertise in regional Australia.

Bruce Speirs, Executive Business Banking, Bendigo Bank, said the partnership with Tyro and development of a new co-brand is a positive development for its business banking customers.

"In line with our group strategy to invest in capability and reduce complexity, we are reshaping our Merchant Services offering to help customers better run their businesses and further improve the market-leading customer experience we provide."

"Our new partnership with Tyro is an exciting development and I look forward to working with the new team to simplify our product offering and provide enhanced capability which will allow the Bank to further improve the support for our business banking customers," Mr Speirs said.

Tyro's CEO and Managing Director, Robbie Cooke, said the announcement is an exciting combination of Australia’s fifth biggest retail bank with the fifth largest merchant acquiring bank.

"Partnering with Bendigo Bank will see Tyro's leading proprietary payments platform made available to its current and future merchant customers - giving them access to more features, more payment options and seamless integrations to more than 300 point of sale systems," Mr Cooke said.

"Tyro will deploy its payments expertise to Bendigo Bank’s business customers, with Bendigo Bank continuing to provide all other banking services to these customers under a long-term, collaborative and strategic partnering commitment.

"This is a great example of two customer focused Australian organisations coming together to provide better solutions for Australian businesses through a partnering of capability and expertise."