The leader of the New Zealand First party, Winston Peters, may have gone silent on his criticism of the Big Four Australian banks since he became deputy Prime Minister in the Labour-led coalition government. But being a government minister hasn't shut up his party colleague, the outspoken Regional Economic Development minister Shane Jones. Outraged at the continued closure of Westpac, ANZ and BNZ branches in provincial towns (50 closures over the past two years according to the bank workers' union), Jones said the Australian-owned banks should be obligated to adequately service rural areas. He said he would meet with Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr (who is responsible for banking regulation) to discuss the issue. "Their profits over the last ten years have grown by 75 per cent," he said. "I do believe with that level of profit they have an obligation to maintain an extensive level of service." A fire system test that caused an internal power supply failure at the Reserve Bank's head office data centre is being blamed for disruptions to payments systems, reports IT News. The outage took out some fixed phone lines and left banks and government agencies making contingency plans in case settlements were delayed. The extent of disruption to payment services from the Thursday afternoon outage is still unclear. Reuters reported an RBA spokesperson as saying all payments services were affected. An early evening update was that all Department of Human Services payments had been made.