A bank is a financial institution that accepts
deposits from the public and creates a
demand deposit while simultaneously making
loans. Lending activities can be directly performed by the bank or indirectly through
capital markets.
Whereas banks play an important role in financial stability and the
economy of a country, most jurisdictions exercise a
high degree of regulation over banks. Most countries have institutionalized a system known as
fractional-reserve banking, under which banks hold liquid assets equal to only a portion of their current liabilities. In addition to other regulations intended to ensure
liquidity, banks are generally subject to
minimum capital requirements based on an international set of capital standards, the
Basel Accords. (Full article...)
Worldwide, credit union systems vary significantly in their total assets and average institution asset size, ranging from volunteer operations with a handful of members to institutions with hundreds of thousands of members and assets worth billions of US dollars. In 2018, the number of members in credit unions worldwide was 375 million, with over 100 million members having been added since 2016. (Full article...)
Image 2
In American finance, the FDIC problem bank list is a confidential list created and maintained by the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation which lists banks that are in jeopardy of failing. The list is closely monitored, and if problems continue with a listed bank, the FDIC takes control of the bank; it may then sell the problem bank to a stronger one, or liquidate the bank and pay off the depositors. (Full article...)
Unlike
commercial banks and
retail banks, investment banks do not take
deposits. The revenue model of an investment bank comes mostly from the collection of fees for advising on a transaction, contrary to a commercial or retail bank. From the passage of
Glass–Steagall Act in 1933 until its repeal in 1999 by the
Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, the
United States maintained a separation between investment banking and commercial banks. Other industrialized countries, including
G7 countries, have historically not maintained such a separation. As part of the
Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (Dodd–Frank Act of 2010), the
Volcker Rule asserts some institutional separation of investment banking services from commercial banking. (Full article...)
ATMs are known by a variety of names, including automatic teller machines (ATM) in the United States (sometimes
redundantly as "ATM machine"). In Canada, the term automated banking machine (ABM) is also used, although ATM is also very commonly used in Canada, with many Canadian organizations using ATM over ABM. In British English, the terms cashpoint, cash machine and hole in the wall are most widely used.[better source needed] Other terms include any time money, cashline, tyme machine, cash dispenser, cash corner, bankomat, or bancomat. ATMs that are
not operated by a financial institution are known as "
white-label" ATMs. (Full article...)
Image 5
Banking regulation and supervision refers to a form of
financial regulation which subjects
banks to certain requirements, restrictions and guidelines, enforced by a
financial regulatory authority generally referred to as banking supervisor, with semantic variations across jurisdictions. By and large, banking regulation and supervision aims at ensuring that banks are safe and sound and at fostering
market transparency between banks and the individuals and
corporations with whom they conduct business.
Its main component is prudential regulation and supervision whose aim is to ensure that banks are viable and resilient ("safe and sound") so as to reduce the likelihood and impact of bank failures that may trigger
systemic risk. Prudential regulation and supervision requires banks to control risks and hold adequate capital as defined by
capital requirements, liquidity requirements, the imposition of concentration risk (or large exposures) limits, and related reporting and public disclosure requirements and supervisory controls and processes. Other components include supervision aimed at enforcing
consumer protection, sometimes also referred to as conduct-of-business (or simply "conduct") regulation and supervision of banks, and
anti-money laundering supervision that aims to ensure banks implement the applicable
AML/CFT framework.
Deposit insurance and resolution authority are also parts of the banking regulatory and supervisory framework. Bank (prudential) supervision is a form of "microprudential" policy to the extent it applies to individual credit institutions, as opposed to
macroprudential regulation whose intent is to consider the
financial system as a whole. (Full article...)
Fractional-reserve banking is the system of
banking in all countries worldwide, under which banks that take
deposits from the public keep only part of their
deposit liabilities in liquid assets as a reserve, typically lending the remainder to borrowers.
Bank reserves are held as
cash in the bank or as balances in the bank's account at the
central bank. Fractional-reserve banking differs from the hypothetical alternative model,
full-reserve banking, in which banks would keep all depositor funds on hand as reserves.
The country's central bank may determine a minimum amount that banks must hold in reserves, called the "
reserve requirement" or "reserve ratio". Most commercial banks hold more than this minimum amount as
excess reserves. Some countries, e.g. the core
Anglosphere countries of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and the three Scandinavian countries, do not impose reserve requirements at all. (Full article...)
Image 7
A merchant bank is historically a bank dealing in commercial loans and investment. In modern British usage it is the same as an
investment bank. Merchant banks were the first modern banks and evolved from medieval
merchants who traded in commodities, particularly
cloth merchants. Historically, merchant banks' purpose was to facilitate and/or finance production and trade of commodities, hence the name "merchant". Few banks today restrict their activities to such a narrow scope.
In modern usage in the
United States, the term additionally has taken on a more narrow meaning, and refers to a
financial institution providing capital to companies in the form of share ownership instead of loans. A merchant bank also provides advice on corporate matters to the firms in which they invest. (Full article...)
Image 8
A bank run or run on the bank occurs when many
clients withdraw their money from a
bank, because they believe
the bank may fail in the near future. In other words, it is when, in a
fractional-reserve banking system (where banks normally only keep a small proportion of their assets as cash), numerous customers withdraw cash from
deposit accounts with a financial institution at the same time because they believe that the financial institution is, or might become,
insolvent. When they transfer funds to another institution, it may be characterized as a
capital flight. As a bank run progresses, it may become a
self-fulfilling prophecy: as more people withdraw cash, the likelihood of default increases, triggering further withdrawals. This can destabilize the bank to the point where it runs out of cash and thus faces sudden
bankruptcy. To combat a bank run, a bank may acquire more cash from other banks or from the
central bank, or limit the amount of cash customers may withdraw, either by imposing a hard limit or by scheduling quick deliveries of cash, encouraging high-return
term deposits to reduce on-demand withdrawals or suspending withdrawals altogether.
A banking panic or bank panic is a
financial crisis that occurs when many banks suffer runs at the same time, as people suddenly try to convert their threatened deposits into cash or try to get out of their domestic banking system altogether. A systemic banking crisis is one where all or almost all of the banking capital in a country is wiped out. The resulting chain of bankruptcies can cause a long
economic recession as domestic businesses and consumers are starved of capital as the domestic banking system shuts down. According to former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman
Ben Bernanke, the
Great Depression was caused by the failure of the
Federal Reserve System to prevent deflation, and much of the economic damage was caused directly by bank runs. The cost of cleaning up a systemic banking crisis can be huge, with fiscal costs averaging 13% of
GDP and economic output losses averaging 20% of GDP for important crises from 1970 to 2007. (Full article...)
It can also refer to a
bank or a division of a large bank that deals with corporations or large or middle-sized businesses, to differentiate from
retail banks and
investment banks. Commercial banks include private sector banks and
public sector banks. (Full article...)
The Bank of China was founded in 1912 by the Republican government as China's central bank, replacing the
Qing dynasty's
Ta-Ching Government Bank. It has been the second oldest bank in China still in existence after the
Bank of Communications, founded in 1908. From its establishment until 1942, it issued banknotes on behalf of the Government along with the "Big Four" banks of the period: the
Farmers Bank of China,
Bank of Communications and
Central Bank of the Republic of China. After the People's Republic was established in 1949, it has become a national commercial and foreign exchange professional bank. Its original central bank designation was carried on by the newly formed
People's Bank of China. (Full article...)
The Laurentian Bank of Canada (LBC; French: Banque Laurentienne du Canada) is a
Schedule 1 bank that operates primarily in the province of
Quebec, with commercial and business banking offices located in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia. LBC's Institution Number (or
routing number) is 039.
The institution was established as the Montreal City and District Savings Bank in 1846. Shares for the bank were publicly listed on the
Montreal Stock Exchange in 1965 and the
Toronto Stock Exchange in 1983. In 1987, the institution was renamed the Laurentian Bank of Canada. (Full article...)
On September 25, 2008, the United States
Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) seized WaMu's banking operations and placed it into
receivership with the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The OTS took the action due to the withdrawal of US$16.7billion in deposits during a 9-day
bank run (amounting to 9% of the deposits it had held on June 30, 2008). The FDIC sold the banking subsidiaries (minus unsecured debt and equity claims) to
JPMorgan Chase for $1.9billion, which had been considering acquiring WaMu as part of a plan internally nicknamed "Project West". All WaMu branches were rebranded as Chase branches by the end of 2009. The holding company was left with $33billion in assets, and $8billion in debt, after being stripped of its banking subsidiary by the FDIC. The next day, it filed for
Chapter 11 voluntary bankruptcy in Delaware, where it was incorporated. (Full article...)
Bank One traces its roots to the merger of Illinois based
First Chicago NBD, and Ohio-based First Banc Group (later Bank One), a holding company for the City National Bank in
Columbus,
Ohio. (Full article...)
It was the first building society in the United Kingdom to
demutualise, doing so in July 1989. The bank expanded through a number of acquisitions in the 1990s, including
James Hay, Scottish Mutual, Scottish Provident and the rail leasing company
Porterbrook. Abbey National launched an online bank,
Cahoot, in June 2000. (Full article...)
ABC has 320 million retail customers, 2.7 million corporate clients, and nearly 24,000 branches. It is China's third-largest lender by assets. ABC went public in mid-2010, fetching the world's biggest ever
initial public offering (IPO) at the time, since overtaken by the
Saudi Arabianstate-runpetroleum enterprise,
Saudi Aramco. In 2011, it ranked eighth among the Top 1000 World Banks, by 2015, it ranked third in Forbes' 13th annual Global 2000 list and in 2017 it ranked fifth. In 2023, Agricultural Bank of China was ranked #4 in Forbes' Global 2000 (World's Largest Public Companies). It is considered a
systemically important bank by the
Financial Stability Board. (Full article...)
Image 2Statesman
Jan van den Brink was instrumental in the merger of Amsterdamsche Bank and Rotterdamsche Bank in 1964, and remained on the bank's board until 1978 (from AMRO Bank)
A bank is a financial institution that accepts
deposits from the public and creates a
demand deposit while simultaneously making
loans. Lending activities can be directly performed by the bank or indirectly through
capital markets.
Whereas banks play an important role in financial stability and the
economy of a country, most jurisdictions exercise a
high degree of regulation over banks. Most countries have institutionalized a system known as
fractional-reserve banking, under which banks hold liquid assets equal to only a portion of their current liabilities. In addition to other regulations intended to ensure
liquidity, banks are generally subject to
minimum capital requirements based on an international set of capital standards, the
Basel Accords. (Full article...)
Worldwide, credit union systems vary significantly in their total assets and average institution asset size, ranging from volunteer operations with a handful of members to institutions with hundreds of thousands of members and assets worth billions of US dollars. In 2018, the number of members in credit unions worldwide was 375 million, with over 100 million members having been added since 2016. (Full article...)
Image 2
In American finance, the FDIC problem bank list is a confidential list created and maintained by the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation which lists banks that are in jeopardy of failing. The list is closely monitored, and if problems continue with a listed bank, the FDIC takes control of the bank; it may then sell the problem bank to a stronger one, or liquidate the bank and pay off the depositors. (Full article...)
Unlike
commercial banks and
retail banks, investment banks do not take
deposits. The revenue model of an investment bank comes mostly from the collection of fees for advising on a transaction, contrary to a commercial or retail bank. From the passage of
Glass–Steagall Act in 1933 until its repeal in 1999 by the
Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, the
United States maintained a separation between investment banking and commercial banks. Other industrialized countries, including
G7 countries, have historically not maintained such a separation. As part of the
Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (Dodd–Frank Act of 2010), the
Volcker Rule asserts some institutional separation of investment banking services from commercial banking. (Full article...)
ATMs are known by a variety of names, including automatic teller machines (ATM) in the United States (sometimes
redundantly as "ATM machine"). In Canada, the term automated banking machine (ABM) is also used, although ATM is also very commonly used in Canada, with many Canadian organizations using ATM over ABM. In British English, the terms cashpoint, cash machine and hole in the wall are most widely used.[better source needed] Other terms include any time money, cashline, tyme machine, cash dispenser, cash corner, bankomat, or bancomat. ATMs that are
not operated by a financial institution are known as "
white-label" ATMs. (Full article...)
Image 5
Banking regulation and supervision refers to a form of
financial regulation which subjects
banks to certain requirements, restrictions and guidelines, enforced by a
financial regulatory authority generally referred to as banking supervisor, with semantic variations across jurisdictions. By and large, banking regulation and supervision aims at ensuring that banks are safe and sound and at fostering
market transparency between banks and the individuals and
corporations with whom they conduct business.
Its main component is prudential regulation and supervision whose aim is to ensure that banks are viable and resilient ("safe and sound") so as to reduce the likelihood and impact of bank failures that may trigger
systemic risk. Prudential regulation and supervision requires banks to control risks and hold adequate capital as defined by
capital requirements, liquidity requirements, the imposition of concentration risk (or large exposures) limits, and related reporting and public disclosure requirements and supervisory controls and processes. Other components include supervision aimed at enforcing
consumer protection, sometimes also referred to as conduct-of-business (or simply "conduct") regulation and supervision of banks, and
anti-money laundering supervision that aims to ensure banks implement the applicable
AML/CFT framework.
Deposit insurance and resolution authority are also parts of the banking regulatory and supervisory framework. Bank (prudential) supervision is a form of "microprudential" policy to the extent it applies to individual credit institutions, as opposed to
macroprudential regulation whose intent is to consider the
financial system as a whole. (Full article...)
Fractional-reserve banking is the system of
banking in all countries worldwide, under which banks that take
deposits from the public keep only part of their
deposit liabilities in liquid assets as a reserve, typically lending the remainder to borrowers.
Bank reserves are held as
cash in the bank or as balances in the bank's account at the
central bank. Fractional-reserve banking differs from the hypothetical alternative model,
full-reserve banking, in which banks would keep all depositor funds on hand as reserves.
The country's central bank may determine a minimum amount that banks must hold in reserves, called the "
reserve requirement" or "reserve ratio". Most commercial banks hold more than this minimum amount as
excess reserves. Some countries, e.g. the core
Anglosphere countries of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and the three Scandinavian countries, do not impose reserve requirements at all. (Full article...)
Image 7
A merchant bank is historically a bank dealing in commercial loans and investment. In modern British usage it is the same as an
investment bank. Merchant banks were the first modern banks and evolved from medieval
merchants who traded in commodities, particularly
cloth merchants. Historically, merchant banks' purpose was to facilitate and/or finance production and trade of commodities, hence the name "merchant". Few banks today restrict their activities to such a narrow scope.
In modern usage in the
United States, the term additionally has taken on a more narrow meaning, and refers to a
financial institution providing capital to companies in the form of share ownership instead of loans. A merchant bank also provides advice on corporate matters to the firms in which they invest. (Full article...)
Image 8
A bank run or run on the bank occurs when many
clients withdraw their money from a
bank, because they believe
the bank may fail in the near future. In other words, it is when, in a
fractional-reserve banking system (where banks normally only keep a small proportion of their assets as cash), numerous customers withdraw cash from
deposit accounts with a financial institution at the same time because they believe that the financial institution is, or might become,
insolvent. When they transfer funds to another institution, it may be characterized as a
capital flight. As a bank run progresses, it may become a
self-fulfilling prophecy: as more people withdraw cash, the likelihood of default increases, triggering further withdrawals. This can destabilize the bank to the point where it runs out of cash and thus faces sudden
bankruptcy. To combat a bank run, a bank may acquire more cash from other banks or from the
central bank, or limit the amount of cash customers may withdraw, either by imposing a hard limit or by scheduling quick deliveries of cash, encouraging high-return
term deposits to reduce on-demand withdrawals or suspending withdrawals altogether.
A banking panic or bank panic is a
financial crisis that occurs when many banks suffer runs at the same time, as people suddenly try to convert their threatened deposits into cash or try to get out of their domestic banking system altogether. A systemic banking crisis is one where all or almost all of the banking capital in a country is wiped out. The resulting chain of bankruptcies can cause a long
economic recession as domestic businesses and consumers are starved of capital as the domestic banking system shuts down. According to former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman
Ben Bernanke, the
Great Depression was caused by the failure of the
Federal Reserve System to prevent deflation, and much of the economic damage was caused directly by bank runs. The cost of cleaning up a systemic banking crisis can be huge, with fiscal costs averaging 13% of
GDP and economic output losses averaging 20% of GDP for important crises from 1970 to 2007. (Full article...)
It can also refer to a
bank or a division of a large bank that deals with corporations or large or middle-sized businesses, to differentiate from
retail banks and
investment banks. Commercial banks include private sector banks and
public sector banks. (Full article...)
The Bank of China was founded in 1912 by the Republican government as China's central bank, replacing the
Qing dynasty's
Ta-Ching Government Bank. It has been the second oldest bank in China still in existence after the
Bank of Communications, founded in 1908. From its establishment until 1942, it issued banknotes on behalf of the Government along with the "Big Four" banks of the period: the
Farmers Bank of China,
Bank of Communications and
Central Bank of the Republic of China. After the People's Republic was established in 1949, it has become a national commercial and foreign exchange professional bank. Its original central bank designation was carried on by the newly formed
People's Bank of China. (Full article...)
The Laurentian Bank of Canada (LBC; French: Banque Laurentienne du Canada) is a
Schedule 1 bank that operates primarily in the province of
Quebec, with commercial and business banking offices located in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia. LBC's Institution Number (or
routing number) is 039.
The institution was established as the Montreal City and District Savings Bank in 1846. Shares for the bank were publicly listed on the
Montreal Stock Exchange in 1965 and the
Toronto Stock Exchange in 1983. In 1987, the institution was renamed the Laurentian Bank of Canada. (Full article...)
On September 25, 2008, the United States
Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) seized WaMu's banking operations and placed it into
receivership with the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The OTS took the action due to the withdrawal of US$16.7billion in deposits during a 9-day
bank run (amounting to 9% of the deposits it had held on June 30, 2008). The FDIC sold the banking subsidiaries (minus unsecured debt and equity claims) to
JPMorgan Chase for $1.9billion, which had been considering acquiring WaMu as part of a plan internally nicknamed "Project West". All WaMu branches were rebranded as Chase branches by the end of 2009. The holding company was left with $33billion in assets, and $8billion in debt, after being stripped of its banking subsidiary by the FDIC. The next day, it filed for
Chapter 11 voluntary bankruptcy in Delaware, where it was incorporated. (Full article...)
Bank One traces its roots to the merger of Illinois based
First Chicago NBD, and Ohio-based First Banc Group (later Bank One), a holding company for the City National Bank in
Columbus,
Ohio. (Full article...)
It was the first building society in the United Kingdom to
demutualise, doing so in July 1989. The bank expanded through a number of acquisitions in the 1990s, including
James Hay, Scottish Mutual, Scottish Provident and the rail leasing company
Porterbrook. Abbey National launched an online bank,
Cahoot, in June 2000. (Full article...)
ABC has 320 million retail customers, 2.7 million corporate clients, and nearly 24,000 branches. It is China's third-largest lender by assets. ABC went public in mid-2010, fetching the world's biggest ever
initial public offering (IPO) at the time, since overtaken by the
Saudi Arabianstate-runpetroleum enterprise,
Saudi Aramco. In 2011, it ranked eighth among the Top 1000 World Banks, by 2015, it ranked third in Forbes' 13th annual Global 2000 list and in 2017 it ranked fifth. In 2023, Agricultural Bank of China was ranked #4 in Forbes' Global 2000 (World's Largest Public Companies). It is considered a
systemically important bank by the
Financial Stability Board. (Full article...)
Image 2Statesman
Jan van den Brink was instrumental in the merger of Amsterdamsche Bank and Rotterdamsche Bank in 1964, and remained on the bank's board until 1978 (from AMRO Bank)