[2] The legal work establishing the bank was performed by a predecessor of King & Wood Mallesons.

Prior to the opening of the bank, several shareholders took an unsuccessful action in the colony's Supreme Court claiming that Cruikshank and several other directors had been appointed illegally.

[citation needed] Expansion to other Australian states followed, with branches opening in Tasmania (1859), Western Australia (1866), New South Wales (1885) and finally Queensland (1920).

Director John Grice was active in the crisis, from which the bank re-emerged as a public limited company, incorporated on 23 June 1893.

For the next half century, growth was stimulated by a number of acquisitions: The bank opened a representative office in Tokyo in 1946, later upgraded to a branch in 1985.