Love it, hate it or don’t even understand it, Bendigo Bank’s multi-million dollar “Better Big Bank” marketing campaign has raised a lot of questions since its launch seven years ago, but as [2025 drew to a close it finally had] one hard fact to hang its hat on.
A review of the “last bank out” of regional towns across Australia since 2020 has revealed that Bendigo has left more communities without banking services than all four big banks put together.
On an individual basis Bendigo is now hands and heels ahead of even NAB, regarded as the worst offender for leaving towns bankless in recent years.
Bendigo ticked over this milestone in October when it closed the last of its agencies, 28 in total and all community-run.
Of the 28 affected towns, 17 had no other banks to fall back on.
They ranged from Grenfell in NSW, where all four of the big banks had previously departed, to Jerilderie and Berrigan, also in NSW, where the local councils had been forced to step in to help provide essential banking services when their towns, too, lost major banks.
Bendigo even pulled the last banking services out of Marysville in Victoria, a town sadly known for the devastation it experienced during the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires that all but wiped it off the map, killing 34 people.
Just 14 of more than 400 buildings survived and in the rebuilding of the town, the provision of banking services was among the infrastructure and amenities noted as essential to support the local economy.
The Marysville agency was established to help survivors to claw their way back, operating first out of a demountable then, in 2014, finally moved to a new building.
According to bank records, the agency had by 2019 brought in $25.5 million in business by 2019.
The reason for these closures?
Bendigo Bank decided there was no longer a place in its business for agencies, which were run through third parties, either attached to the corporate network or a community bank.
It said it was “retiring” the model because it wanted to “prioritise our investments”.
(The exact statement from Bendigo Bank executive Taso Corolis was: “To preserve what makes our bank unique, we must prioritise our investments across both physical and digital channels to continue meeting the changing needs and growing expectations of our 2.7 million customers”.)
There is no argument that Bendigo Bank has shifted in its priorities.
Bank records show an agency could cost its owner as little as $10,000 a year to run but over their history brought in millions of dollars’ worth of business at, in the case of the ones run by community companies, little or no expense to Bendigo Bank.
They provided essential banking services to communities that had either been abandoned by the big four banks or never had a bank of their own.
Small but vital, they were the last line of defence before towns, often remote and isolated, had to work out how to fend for themselves without financial services.
For a bank that built its reputation on being the brand that came to the rescue of regional Australia with its community bank model when the big four began clearing out in the 1990s, saying that providing banking services to towns that have no other options is no longer a priority marks a pivotal change in direction and ethics.
In shifting its focus to behave “like a big bank, but better”, many would say Bendigo has lost its way.
Changing direction
The turning point for Bendigo Bank can be traced to 2018.
Four significant things happened around this time:
- Marnie Baker was named the new chief executive and soon after appointed chief financial officer Richard Fennell as head of the retail network;
- The Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry wound up after two years of hearings;
- Bendigo launched Up, Australia’s first fully cloud-hosted bank, along with the Bendigo Express digital home lending platform; and
- Bendigo rolled out its “Better Big Bank” advertising campaign.
In 2018, Bendigo Bank reported having 530 branches to the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) in its annual points of presence data.
While APRA does not make a distinction between Bendigo’s corporate and third party-owned sites, an audit of the 2018 data revealed that 193 of these branches were owned and operated by Bendigo and Adelaide Bank (181 branded Bendigo Bank and 12 Delphi Bank, which had been bought by the company as the Bank of Cyprus in 2012) and 312 were owned and operated by private companies as community bank franchises.
Another 17 were alliances with mutual banks.
Removing eight entries that appear to have been misreports or can’t be found using the information provided by Bendigo Bank, the branch total for that year was 522, a figure that was reasonably consistent with the five previous years when, on paper, branches had been maintained at more than 500.
Branch numbers were critical to the philosophy of the Better Big Bank campaign.
The research company behind the re-brand, Forethought, believed the size of Bendigo’s branch network could be used to trigger a trust response that could be leveraged off amid the negative fallout the banking industry was experiencing due to the royal commission.
Given this, what Bendigo Bank board chairman Robert Johanson’s told Kenneth Hayne QC about how the branch network was viewed behind closed doors is important.
During Mr Johanson’s evidence, he and Commissioner Hayne discussed home lending and the various channels Bendigo uses to bring in this business.
Mr Johanson was at pains to explain that community banks were considered separate to the bank’s branch network.
“Can I just take a minute to tell you how else we get loans other than just through branches or mortgage brokers,” Mr Johanson asked Commissioner Hayne.
“The largest group of our loans come through our partner network, the community bank network … they get rewarded by, effectively, a revenue share.”
This caught the attention of the commissioner.
“Just pausing there for a moment, Mr Johanson, do I take from that answer that Bendigo has found a number of ways to bring in home loan business other than through its branch network,” he asked.
“Yes,” replied Mr Johanson.
Mr Johanson’s appearance was rounded off with an exchange on the benefits of bringing in home loans without the cost of running branches.
Commissioner Hayne: “You found plenty of ways at Bendigo to bring in home loans other than through your branch network or through brokers?”
Mr Johanson: “Yes, we’ve got a good network.”
The Better Big Bank campaign was launched on November 12, 2018, and for their contribution Forethought won an award from the Advertising Research Foundation in 2020.
In its entry brief, Forethought explained that while the perception of Bendigo Bank as a trustworthy brand had been built on the community banking model’s reputation for sharing profits, this was not translating into growth in customer numbers or product holdings, which had “stagnated”.
“Whilst these efforts were valued by the bank, they were not driving choice in the market or positioning Bendigo Bank for growth,” it said.
“No matter how unsatisfied consumers were with the four major banks, significant barriers to switching and inertia to change meant Bendigo Bank was unable to encourage switching behavior and place itself on the map as a real alternative to the ‘Big Four’.”
Forethought’s plan to turn the situation around was based on two “critical” aspects – putting customers first and demonstrating the size of the bank, including leveraging off its position as Australia’s fifth largest bank.
“Tackling perceptions that the brand was a small, regional bank (and therefore lacking capability) were critical,” it said.
Despite the community bank model having been ruled out as having value for positioning the bank for growth, its sheer branch mass was still needed to mount a convincing argument that Bendigo was capable of being a trustworthy alternative to the big four.
So even though – as Mr Johanson explained – Bendigo did not own these banks, Bendigo’s 500-plus “brand” (Forethought avoided using the word branch) network became imperative to the Better Big Bank message.
The campaign’s launch date – just seven days before the final two weeks of hearings for the royal commission began – was a deliberate strategy to “capitalize on a climaxing disillusion with legacy banks”.
At the helm of Bendigo by this time was Marnie Baker, appointed as chief executive in July 2018.
In charge of the all-important “brand” retail network was Richard Fennell, fresh out of his role as chief financial officer.
Between October 2018 and December 2019, Bendigo Bank’s residential and investment mortgages grew 15 per cent, more than twice the rate of growth for previous corresponding period and nearly four times the rate of the major banks combined.
Whether this would have been achieved just on the back of a marketing campaign alone will never be known but it is likely the jump was propelled by Bendigo’s launch of Up, Australia’s first fully cloud-hosted bank, at the same time Better Big Bank advertising started.
(Forethought did not mention this in its brief.)
Regardless of the reason for these positive shifts, Bendigo Bank had positioned itself well in 2018-2019 to grow its business and had no good reason not to continue doing what had earned the trust of both regional and urban Australians, which was not act like a big bank.
So, what did it do?
Start acting like a big bank.
Closures
The lights began going out in the Bendigo branch and agency network soon after the changing of the guard in 2018.
In the first financial year after Marnie Baker took over the chief executive’s chair from 10-year veteran Mike Hirst and put her accountant into a new role in charge of Bendigo’s Consumer Banking Division, eight branches and 12 agencies were closed.
The branches were all corporate sites, including the former Lakeside Pakenham community branch that was sold to Bendigo Bank on the understanding it would be reopened, but this does not appear to have happened, or was only short-term.
Other metropolitan branches to go were Waymouth St in Adelaide and Osborne Park in Perth.
Regional losses were in Geelong Victoria (Ryrie St, the reason given being its proximity to other branches), Ulverstone in Tasmania (locals reported it closing “suddenly”), a branch in Toowoomba, a mutual alliance site at Mittagong and the only bank at Kuranda in Queensland.
The regional towns of Dareton, Red Cliffs, Lake Cathie, Tallangatta, Churchill, Junee, Beachmere, Naracoorte, Rutherglen, Longwarry, Skipton and Walpole all lost their agencies, eight of these being the last banking services in those towns.
At Walpole, in the south-west of Western Australia, the agency was run out of the Community Resource Centre and serviced about 100 businesses and families.
Its general manager Cherie Smith told local media that the cost of getting cash to the town had been a factor in the decision to close.
“It costs a lot of money to buy and sell cash because you need security guards and armoured trucks,” she said.
In October 2019, Robert Johanson stepped down from the board, ending a 31-year association with Bendigo Bank, to be replaced by Jacqueline Hey.
From that point, closures began to gather speed, with the Baker-Fennell-Hey leadership group overseeing the bank until Hey resigned in 2023.
They started off with the removal of 22 branches and 11 agencies from the network in the 2019-2020 financial year.
Corporate branch closures ranged from Bendigo’s Docklands office in Melbourne, Hutt St Adelaide, Moonah in Hobart and Elizabeth St Sydney, to major regional banks at Orange and Griffith in NSW. Six metropolitan community branches were shut down.
Agency closures left the small towns of Triabunna Tasmania, Dandaragan WA, Quorn SA and Dookie and Meeniyan in Victoria without banking services.
Biggenden in Queensland lost its agency because Bendigo Bank would not allow its owner, Kolan/Perry Community Enterprises Ltd, to relocate it to new premises.
With the arrival of the new financial year, Baker-Fennell-Hey changed up a gear, culling 41 branches and agencies over 12 months from July 2020 to June 2021.
The branches were mainly corporate-owned and included the first of the Delphi Banks to be shut down.
This was the year the busy tourist destination of Queenscliff in Victoria lost its only bank while Bendigo kept open its branch 14km away at Ocean Grove, a town serviced by all four of the big banks.
Nineteen regional agencies were lost in FY2021, with 10 of these in towns where Bendigo was providing the last banking services – Casterton, Leitchville and Murrayville in Victoria, Bulahdelah and Urana in NSW, Lameroo in South Australia and Beacon, Koorda, Darkan and Boyup Brook in Western Australia.
Then there’s Doreen.
On April 8, 2021, the branch closed, only to reopen on June 7 as a cashless bank – possibly Bendigo’s first to be transitioned from full-service branch to just a shop-front focused solely on selling banking products.
The move, according to owner Valley Community Financial Services Ltd’s 2021 annual report, was the result of a review of the group’s five sites “facilitated” by Bendigo Bank.
“With the removal of cash, we have been able to reduce the staffing levels, below minimum requirements when cash is in store,” executive director Barry Henwood said.
“Cash transit is costly and will no longer be an impost on the branch.”
One of the reasons given for the decision was that while local businesses were depositing turnover with the branch, they “for the most part have not supported our business” and could use the post office for their cash needs.
The cuts continued in 2021-2022.
The corporate branch network was reduced by a further 15 mainly metropolitan sites, including eight more Delphi Banks.
The number of community bank branch closures increased to 11 and nine regional agencies also went.
Georgetown Queensland and Canowindra NSW were left without banking services.
In Texas Queensland, it was a race between Bendigo and the National Australia Bank to see who could get out of town first, with NAB winning by a nose.
Bendigo shut up shop 15 days later.
Until 2022, Bendigo Bank had managed to fly under the media radar on closures despite its rapidly dwindling network but in August that year at an investor briefing, Marnie Baker was asked about the community banking program.
Banking Day reported that she confirmed the model was being changed to make it more “sustainable” and Bendigo was in talks with the boards of its 307 community franchises.
“Our community partners know that models need to evolve and change as the environment changes and customer preferences change,” she said.
It was the first semi-public acknowledgement by Bendigo Bank that the community network was in the crosshairs.
The focus of the changes appears to be on consolidation.
Where once agencies and second branches were seen to be adding value by bringing in new business and extending the community banks’ “deposit-roving” and “customer aggregator” capabilities (as Marnie Baker described their purpose), annual reports reveal they were now being identified as cost centres that could be culled and the money saved used to increase shareholder returns and/or go towards sponsorship.
Senate inquiry
In 2023, something happened none of the banks anticipated.
The year before, Bendigo Bank had been part of a Coalition taskforce comprised of mainly banking executives that had basically given a green light to the continued stripping of banking services from regional Australia.
The cuts made, particularly by NAB, in the months that followed the release of the taskforce’s final report were so great they triggered a senate inquiry into regional branch closures.
Called on February 8, 2023, it would be the first serious look at bank behaviour in regional Australia in nearly two decades.
Bendigo Bank was asked to appear at a hearing on May 18 at Ingham in Queensland where it had closed a branch in 2021.
It had not made a submission to the inquiry, but Marnie Baker reworked the one she had completed for the taskforce after the invitation had been issued.
The original submission had made no mention of agency losses and described branch closures in the 2020-2021 financial year as a “relatively small number” even though Bendigo had been cutting more than 20 a year for two years and, when added to the agencies that had been shut down, was the highest number of cuts to services the bank had ever made in a 12-month period.
In her submission for the senators, Baker did acknowledge agency closures but only referenced 15 sites that had been earmarked to go by July 2023.
Richard Fennell represented the bank at the hearing by video link.
He spoke about the agency closures but said he did not think they were “in the scope of this inquiry”.
Neither Baker or Fennell mentioned that they had been quietly dismantling its agency network since 2018 or that there were plans to pull the pin on it altogether, as some agents had already been told.
The actual number of Bendigo Bank agencies lost in financial year 2022-2023 was 23, with another 11 to go in 2023-2024 (six in July 2023) – more than twice the number Marnie Baker had chosen to share.
One of these was at Omeo, where the East Gippsland Shire Council was financially supporting the retention of the agency there.
“Perhaps some reciprocity of social investment could be forthcoming to our communities,” Mayor Mark Reeves said to senators when speaking of the closure at a hearing in Sale.
Another was at Aurukun in Far North Queensland, the only indigenous community left where Bendigo Bank still had a presence.
The reason given for the closure was staffing issues, despite this being a cultural environment well known for employee turnover.
Three weeks after closing Aurukun, Richard Fennell officiated at a street party to launch Bendigo Bank’s Indigenous Reconciliation Action Plan, with one of the key actions being to “improve employment outcomes by increasing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander recruitment, retention and professional development”.
Oblivious to the fact Bendigo Bank had quietly exited the indigenous community, the senators highlighted the success and importance of the Aurukun agency in the inquiry’s final report.
Across the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 financial years – covering when the senate inquiry was in progress – Bendigo Bank closed 22 branches and 34 agencies, leaving another 16 regional towns without banking services.
They included Whitemark on Flinders Island with, according to a submission from Flinders Council, no consultation with the agency owners or community. Council estimated that doing certain transactions and business would now involve a $470 return airfare, car hire/taxi fees and a whole day for island residents to travel to Launceston to do their banking.
Beaconsfield Tasmania also lost its agency, which had only been opened in 2020 after a long fight by the community to secure banking services, and a clutch of northern Victorian towns – Barham, Pyramid Hill, Sea Lake and Stanhope – that finally caught the attention of the media and MPs.
The final report from the senate inquiry was tabled on May 24, 2024, delivering a set of recommendations that would send the banking industry into a tailspin, including independent regulation and a pathway to re-establish a government bank.
At Bendigo, Marnie Baker called it a day in August 2024, handing the reins over to Richard Fennell, who, like all the bank chief executives, was watching to see how the government would respond to the senate report.
Just four branches – a mutual alliance, two community banks and a metropolitan corporate site – and no agencies were closed in the 2024-2025 financial year.
When it appeared clear the Albanese Government had no intention of responding to the report after a year, and Bendigo Bank had not been asked to agree to a regional branch closure moratorium with the big four banks, Fennell, aided by new board chairwoman Vicki Carter, resumed usual programming.
Unlike the previous CEO’s time, he knew he couldn’t cut branches quietly due to changes to the Banking Code of Practice’s branch closure protocol, so on July 2, 2025, Bendigo released a public statement announcing it was closing 10 branches between August and October.
Three weeks later came the announcement Bendigo was “retiring” its agency model with the loss of the remaining 28 community-run sites.
It would be a combined loss of 38 branches and agencies, with 22 towns to lose their last banking services: Queenstown, the last bank on the west coast of Tasmania, Bannockburn, Korumburra, Yarram, Clunes, Boort, Alexandra, Marysville, Wedderburn, Wycheproof and Welshpool in Victoria, Berrigan, Blackheath, Buronga, Darlington Point, Grenfell, Jerilderie and Mathoura in NSW, Malanda and Taroom in Queensland, Port MacDonnell in South Australia and Cunderdin in Western Australia.
The outrage was national and it was palpable, with Richard Fennell’s refusal to engage where it counted – publicly and at a community level – creating a bitterness towards Bendigo Bank it has never experienced before.
The Better Big Bank campaign made it an even bigger target.
“Bendigo Bank describes itself as ‘the better big bank’, but actions speak louder than words,” Flynn MP Colin Boyce told Federal Parliament on July 23.
“The Bendigo Bank likes to promote itself as the better big bank, but when it comes to shutting down branches, the Bendigo Bank is proving to be just as bad as the rest of them,” Gippsland MP Darren Chester continued the following day.
“The Bendigo Bank tagline is ‘The Better Big Bank – caring for millions of customers, you need a bank to give you the products and services you need. We need your banking to help us make a difference’; it now appears as they have got bigger the regional centres are made redundant. Where is the customer care?” asked the mayor of Weddin Shire, Paul Best, on July 25.
Kevin Mackin of the Yarram Progress Association was reported in Choice as saying, “I believed all the marketing about being the ‘better big bank’. I thought and believed they had a real sense of being a community bank and the sense that they were contributing to Australia, but I don’t think that has been demonstrated in the way they’ve treated Yarram. They aren’t ‘the better big bank’, they are worse than any of the banks I’ve dealt with.”
Darren Chester was particularly irate with Bendigo Bank leadership after being refused admittance to a community meeting on the Yarram and Korumburra closures in his electorate, prompting him to put out the following statement:
“How do you know when an Australian bank executive is lying?
“It’s when their lips are moving!”
Ten years ago, a regional politician talking about Bendigo Bank like that would have been unheard of.
In Tasmania, the Member for Braddon, Anita Dow, had this to say in the Tasmanian Parliament about an invitation she issued to Bendigo Bank to attend a community meeting about the Queenstown closure:
“They declined to attend and they declined to front the community. The thing about this that makes me the angriest is that those representatives from the bank who are responsible for making this decision haven’t even been to Queenstown, or the West Coast. They haven’t even made the effort to hear directly from locals about how this decision will affect their lives. I find that shocking.”
In 2025, Bendigo notched up 12 mentions by 10 MPs and senators Federal Parliament alone, something not even the big banks had achieved for decades.
Over the course of four months while the affected towns fought fruitlessly to save their banking services, Bendigo did not budge an inch on its plans, despite the blows to its reputation being dished out in national media coverage.
It opted instead to write off $540 million in goodwill impairment as a paper loss but there was no apology for the cuts.
Bendigo finished the year having closed nearly 40 per cent of its banking sites (116 branches and 115 agencies) since it became the better big bank.
The branch network sits at 406, with just 116 of these corporate-owned (62 are in regional Australia and 54 in capital cities).
That is a 36 per cent cut to Bendigo Bank’s corporate branch network since 2018.
View Bendigo Bank – all available information in a full screen map
Risky business
Bendigo Bank all but confirmed at an investor briefing on December 4 that there will be more branch closures.
Chief financial officer Andrew Morgan described it as “refining” the cost of the corporate property footprint.
“Our work in this area in the last few years has been substantial and will continue,” he said.
“As one example, in the last three years, we’ve reduced our corporate property footprint and rent expense by 30 per cent and we can see a path to a further 15 per cent rent reduction in the next three years.
“We’ll have more to say through the course of the next half as our plans continue to harden up.”
The closures and more job losses, also flagged in the briefing by Morgan, will help offset the costs of digital banking, which he says are rising faster than inflation.
Bendigo Bank is also now dealing with a money laundering crisis, and questions are already being asked about how this might affect the future of its branch network.
This issue exploded in late November when Bendigo made an announcement to the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) that its risk management for money laundering and terrorism financing had been found to be unsatisfactory after suspicious activity was identified at one of its branches.
The news triggered a -6.51 per cent share price crash.
In response, APRA has told Bendigo it must now hold an operational risk capital add-on of $50 million and undertake a “root cause analysis” of all non-financial risk management issues at the bank, not just money laundering and terrorism financing.
The Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC) is also investigating whether the bank has breached the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act, with fines in the tens of millions a possibility if so.
At the centre of this mess is a now-closed Pinewood Community Bank at Mount Waverly in Melbourne, identified by The Australian on December 5.
Richard Fennell was asked at the investor briefing whether the community bank model exposed Bendigo Bank to more anti-money laundering risks and his answer wouldn’t have given franchisees confidence there won’t be repercussions.
“I think the community bank model is 28 years old now, and it’s been a wonderful supporter of our ability to grow our business and also to grow our deposit base – the reality is, as we do this review, we’ll look at all aspects of our business,” he said.
While Fennell noted that the transaction monitoring that has come under scrutiny is the same for the Up app as it is for branches, there is no doubt that it will be the branch network that is going to come under the greatest fire.
Cash – already flagged as a cost factor in closures – has suddenly become an even greater headache.
Cashless banking is another way Bendigo is starting to replicate the behavior of the big four, doing what Regional Banking Investment Alliance spokesperson David Heine described as “separating the profitable part of banking from the social contract of providing real branch services”.
Last year, Bendigo replaced a branch it closed at Griffith in 2020 with a cashless office in a new main street location between its competitors.
It was also a surprise to see St Arnaud, an agency earmarked for closure in October, still listed on the Bendigo Bank website a month later.
It was categorised as “office (cashless)”.
While not the last bank in town, the St Arnaud agency was the only banking service open when businesses needed it, with traditional bank hours – Monday to Friday, from 10am till late into the afternoon.
A visit to St Arnaud revealed little change to the site from the outside, but closer inspection told the story: this was now just a desk and a chair in a shopfront selling Bendigo Bank products – accounts, loans, credit cards, insurance etc.
Cashless banks are not recognised by APRA as branches under data legislation and conversion of a full-service branch to a cashless site represents a branch loss.
They do not provide vital banking services.
If placed in locations where there are other full-service branches, they threaten the viability of other banks that are doing the right thing.
It will be interesting to watch whether the review into its money laundering vulnerabilities gives Bendigo a reason to justify pushing further down this road.
For better or worse?
Bendigo is a vastly different business now to what it was seven years ago.
The Better Big Bank campaign dated quickly, with its pillar slogan, “Four good reasons to try the fifth”, soon becoming problematic.
The last time Bendigo Bank made a reference to itself being Australia’s fifth largest retail bank in an annual report was 2020, with it changing its pitch in 2023 and 2024 to “having Australia’s fourth largest branch network”, which was dropped as well in 2025 amid the closure furore.
Some analysts are reporting Bendigo as now being in sixth place behind Macquarie on market capitalisation, but it depends on whether they are looking at the group or bank alone.
In the other categories commonly used to measure size, Bendigo is currently seventh behind Bank of Queensland in total residents’ assets, seventh behind ING and Bank of Queensland in owner-occupier home loans and close to falling out of the top 10 in ninth place for investor home loans.
“Four good reasons to try the sixth, seventh or ninth” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
On the subject of trust, the year of the campaign’s launch Bendigo sat at the top of Roy Morgan’s list of the most trustworthy financial institutions and in third place overall in the brand category, largely thanks to its community bank network.
It and ING were the only banks to make the brand top 10.
In the latest survey, Bendigo has dropped out of the top 10 overall brand ranking altogether (in 14th place) and was knocked out of first place as Australia’s most trusted lender by the Commonwealth Bank, which was this year’s seventh most-trusted brand overall.
Bendigo also rated very poorly in the last Rank The Banks Report, where it was found to be the worst of the banks for rejecting a financial counsellor’s third party authority that allows them to represent clients, considered a very serious offence by author, Financial Counselling Australia.
In February Bendigo shut down its Connected Communities program that had returned more than $18 million to community groups since its inception and was caught out in September placing postcodes on a home lending blacklist based on their links to mining.
And what of Forethought’s aim of “communicating capability through putting customers first and demonstrating the size of the bank” being “critical to re-positioning the bank as a real alternative to the big four”?
Bendigo’s corporate branch network – the sites former board chief Robert Johanson made a point of separating from the community franchises at the Royal Commission – has been cut into so deeply that only the smallest of margin now separates it from rival Bank of Queensland since BoQ completed buying out its franchises.
Further flagged branch closures will reduce this gap, if BoQ maintains its network.
As for putting customers first, there is, finally, that very embarrassing statistic of Bendigo having left more towns without banking services since 2020 than all four big banks put together.
If providing core banking services to vulnerable communities is no longer a priority, the time may have come for Bendigo to also retire its Better Big Bank campaign.
If it didn’t make sense in 2018, it makes even less now.
View Towns left with no banking services 2020 to 2025 in a full screen map
This article appeared on The Regional on 31 December 2025.
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