After spending the past five decades behind the counter and in the office at the Bendigo Bank, Mr Ruff says his two most important tools remain the same – “a Biro and a brain”.

Mr Ruff says when he first walked through the doors of the then Sandhurst Building Society in 1966, everything was done by hand.

“Everything went automated once you got a computer in front of you,” he says.

“However in saying that, human contact is much more important than doing anything by a computer because if you don’t have that rapport with the client I don’t think you’ve got anything.

“It’s old-fashioned banking still because really, they’re not reliant on us, we’re reliant on them, because if we don’t have them we don’t have a business.”

Mr Ruff says it’s that rapport with his many customers and coworkers, who he describes as “good, decent, wonderful people”, he will miss most after his planned retirement at the end of the year.

“Once I finish up I will find it hard not to have that constant contact, not only with the clients but with the people I physically work with as well,” he said.

“I couldn’t have gone through all these years and not want to keep contact with these people.”

Mr Ruff’s banking career actually started 18 months before he joined the SBS, when he worked across the road from the current Bendigo Bank headquarters in Bath Lane at the Commercial Bank of Australia.

And it was young love, which at the age of 19 led him to make the switch to the company now known as the Bendigo Bank.

“I’d actually met a girl and I didn't want to leave Bendigo because I thought if I left Bendigo someone else would move in,” he says.

“I shifted up to the Sandhurst Building Society and that girl’s been my wife for the past 47 years, so I think it was a pretty good decision.”