The New Zealand-born executive has been appointed chief executive of Defence Bank, a customer-owned mutual organisation based in Melbourne.

Mr Marshall said with family in the Victorian capital there were personal as well as professional factors in his decision.

He took over as Hume boss in February 2015, replacing Andrew Saxby who was in the role for 12 years.

“The thing I’m most proud of is the broadening out of our digital and online capability and changing our offering to customers in line with their needs,” Mr Marshall said.

“We know with 50 per cent of customers these days, their preferred channel is online for their basic transactions.”

That focus on online banking has been evident in a $1 million makeover of Hume’s Olive Street head office in Albury and a new technology-driven branch opening in Wodonga Place during Mr Marshall’s stint.

Less popular have been the closure of shopping centre branches in Albury (West End Plaza) and Wodonga (Birallee Village).

Mr Marshall attributed the closures to low transactions.

He will finish his term at Hume in late January.

Meanwhile, Hume Bank’s chief customer officer Andrew de Graaff has welcomed the federal government’s Royal Commission into the nation’s banking sector.

“There has been quite a bit of negative sentiment towards financial institutions, banks in particular, and that’s a result of a lot of scandals, particularly with majors and by sheer association Hume Bank can be easily tarnished with that brush because we’re a bank,” “Mr de Graff said.

“This will give certainty to the public and dispel myths and rebuild trust.”

Mr de Graff said Hume had no plans to put its own submission to the Royal Commission which will examine misconduct in the banking, superannuation and financial services sectors.

The former Westpac and ANZ employee said the key difference between those big banks and Hume was that not everything at the Border institution is examined through a “shareholder lens”.

“We are customer owned and always have been,” Mr de Graff said.