Westpac and its banking counterparts took a full day yesterday to work through the mess created by a failure of the bank's batch payment processing procedures on Monday evening. The bank did not disclose the nature of the failure, which was variously described as a corrupt file, a glitch, an issue and a disruption, as well as a problem in bank communications, in the mainstream, technology and social media.Primary batch files, normally due at around 6pm, were not made available until 15 hours later. Other batch payment files were distributed progressively to banks during the day.While most banks posted Westpac payments to accounts promptly, in some cases, customers were not expected to receive the payments until late last night.National Australia Bank said a minority of customer accounts would be updated overnight.Queensland Police Credit Union advised its members that it was still to receive many payroll files from Westpac and that transactions may only reach accounts today.In May, a breakdown in the air-conditioning unit at Westpac's primary data centre in Sydney led to the loss of key merchants' services, and to Eftpos and ATM service loss for part or all of the day.In April, batch-processing strife delayed public sector payrolls in New Zealand.