Briefs: Svenska opens rep office, Westpac supports payments coordination, Kiwbank delays and Bendigo

Svenska Handelsbanken has secured clearance to open a representative office in Australia. The Swedish bank, which has around US$340 billion in assets, has expanded in Europe, after surviving a local banking crisis, and is in better shape than of any of its rivals. In Asia, the Swedish bank has a single branch in Singapore and four representative offices in Beijing, Taipei, Mumbai and Kuala Lumpur.

Clive Whincup, chief information officer of Westpac, acknowledged a need for more coordination to speed up payment processing. "The lack of a centrally managed and governed clearing house in Australia makes that very hard to achieve, so I would expect in the future there would be more direction and governance centrally to co-ordinate the banks along those lines," Whincup told a CEDA lunch in Sydney and reported by AAP. "We're ready for more centralised co-ordination and we welcome any innovation which we can see adds value for customers." Glenn Stevens, governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, on Monday sketched out plans to plans to take a bigger role in directing co-operative infrastructure developments in the payments system.

Kiwibank said it resolved two payment processing outages that occurred yesterday between 3.45pm and 4pm and 6pm and 11pm, Fairfax Media reported. Spokesman Bruce Thompson said there had been problems with the core banking system throughout the day. This affected phone banking and internet banking. ATM and eftpos transactions worked through the day, but from 6pm those two latter services would only recognise account balance recorded as at that time. Radio New Zealand, meanwhile, reported that Bank of New Zealand processed some Visa transactions multiple times over the past week.

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has reported a lift in impaired and past-due loans in the March 2012 quarter, largely because of the inclusion of Bank of Cyprus in its data, following the recent takeover of the latter. Retail loans that are 90 days or more overdue increased by one quarter, to A$556 million. Retail loans that are impaired increased by one tenth, to $364 million. Gross credit exposures increased by only four per cent, to $42.5 billion. Bank of Cyprus continues, for now, to produce its own quarterly report on credit risk. At March 2012 it put its impaired and overdue loans at zero.