"Banq" and "banc" are alternative spellings used in company names to evade legal restrictions on the use of the word 'bank' while maintaining a similar pronunciation. This practice is common in the financial services industry, particularly in the United States. (Full article...)

Investment banking is an advisory-based financial service for institutional investors, corporations, governments, and similar clients. Traditionally associated with corporate finance, such a bank might assist in raising financial capital by underwriting or acting as the client's agent in the issuance of debt or equity securities. An investment bank may also assist companies involved in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and provide ancillary services such as market making, trading of derivatives and equity securities, FICC services (fixed income instruments, currencies, and commodities) or research (macroeconomic, credit or equity research). Most investment banks maintain prime brokerage and asset management departments in conjunction with their investment research businesses. As an industry, it is broken up into the Bulge Bracket (upper tier), Middle Market (mid-level businesses), and boutique market (specialized businesses).

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...)

A cheque (or check in American English; see spelling differences) is a document that orders a bank, building society, or credit union, to pay a specific amount of money from a person's account to the person in whose name the cheque has been issued. The person writing the cheque, known as the drawer, has a transaction banking account (often called a current, cheque, chequing, checking, or share draft account) where the money is held. The drawer writes various details including the monetary amount, date, and a payee on the cheque, and signs it, ordering their bank, known as the drawee, to pay the amount of money stated to the payee.

Although forms of cheques have been in use since ancient times and at least since the 9th century, they became a highly popular non-cash method for making payments during the 20th century and usage of cheques peaked. By the second half of the 20th century, as cheque processing became automated, billions of cheques were issued annually; these volumes peaked in or around the early 1990s. Since then cheque usage has fallen, being replaced by electronic payment systems, such as debit cards and credit cards. In an increasing number of countries cheques have either become a marginal payment system or have been completely phased out. (Full article...)

The Bank War was a political struggle that developed over the issue of rechartering the Second Bank of the United States (B.U.S.) during the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–1837). The affair resulted in the shutdown of the Bank and its replacement by state banks.

The Second Bank of the United States was chartered for twenty years as a private institution with exclusive authority to operate on a national scale. While its stated purpose was to stabilize the American economy through a uniform currency and stronger federal presence, critics questioned whom it truly served. Supporters claimed that the Bank helped regulate prices, extend credit, provide a reliable currency, and offer essential services to the Treasury. However, Jacksonian Democrats and other opponents highlighted troubling examples of favoritism, alleging that the Bank catered to wealthy merchants and speculators while sidelining farmers, artisans, and small businesses. They pointed to the Bank's use of public funds for risky private ventures and its entanglement in political affairs as evidence of undue influence. For many, its blend of public authority and private profit was unconstitutional and eroded democratic ideals and state sovereignty. To its detractors, the Bank was a symbol of elite privilege and a potential threat to individual liberty. (Full article...)

Banking secrecy, alternatively known as financial privacy, banking discretion, or bank safety, is a conditional agreement between a bank and its clients that all foregoing activities remain secure, confidential, and private. Most often associated with banking in Switzerland, banking secrecy is prevalent in Luxembourg, Monaco, Hong Kong, Singapore, Ireland, and Lebanon, among other off-shore banking institutions.

Otherwise known as bank–client confidentiality or banker–client privilege, the practice was started by Italian merchants during the 1600s near Northern Italy (a region that would become the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland). Geneva bankers established secrecy socially and through civil law in the French-speaking region during the 1700s. Swiss banking secrecy was first codified with the Banking Act of 1934, thus making it a crime to disclose client information to third parties without a client's consent. The law, coupled with a stable Swiss currency and international neutrality, prompted large capital flight to private Swiss accounts. During the 1940s, numbered bank accounts were introduced creating an enduring principle of bank secrecy that continues to be considered one of the main aspects of private banking globally. Advances in financial cryptography (via public-key cryptography) could make it possible to use anonymous electronic money and anonymous digital bearer certificates for financial privacy and anonymous Internet banking, given enabling institutions and secure computer systems. (Full article...)

A deposit account is a bank account maintained by a financial institution in which a customer can deposit and withdraw money. Deposit accounts can be savings accounts, current accounts or any of several other types of accounts explained below.

Transactions on deposit accounts are recorded in a bank's books, and the resulting balance is recorded as a liability of the bank and represents an amount owed by the bank to the customer. In other words, the banker-customer (depositor) relationship is one of debtor-creditor. Some banks charge fees for transactions on a customer's account. Additionally, some banks pay customers interest on their account balances. (Full article...)

The 2008 financial crisis, also known as the global financial crisis (GFC), was a major worldwide economic crisis, centered in the United States, which triggered the Great Recession of late 2007 to mid-2009, the most severe downturn since the 1929 Wall Street crash and Great Depression. The causes of the 2008 crisis included predatory lending in the form of subprime mortgages and a resulting U.S. housing bubble, excessive risk-taking by global financial institutions, and lack of regulatory oversight. The first phase of the crisis began in early 2007, as mortgage-backed securities (MBS) tied to U.S. real estate, and a vast web of derivatives linked to those MBS, collapsed in value. A liquidity crisis spread to global institutions by mid-2007 and climaxed with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, which triggered a stock market crash and international banking crisis.

During the 1990s, the U.S. Congress had passed legislation intended to expand affordable housing through looser financing rules, and in 1999, parts of the 1933 Banking Act (Glass–Steagall Act) were repealed, enabling institutions to mix low-risk operations, such as commercial banking and insurance, with higher-risk operations such as investment banking and proprietary trading. As the Federal Reserve ("Fed") lowered the federal funds rate from 2000 to 2003, institutions increasingly targeted low-income homebuyers, largely belonging to racial minorities, with high-risk loans; this development went unattended by regulators. As interest rates rose from 2004 to 2006, the cost of mortgages rose and the demand for housing fell; in early 2007, as more U.S. subprime mortgage holders began defaulting on their repayments, lenders went bankrupt, culminating in the bankruptcy of New Century Financial in April. As demand and prices continued to fall, the financial contagion spread to global credit markets by August 2007, and central banks began injecting liquidity. In March 2008, Bear Stearns, the fifth largest U.S. investment bank, was sold to JPMorgan Chase in a "fire sale" backed by Fed financing. (Full article...)

A custodian bank, or simply custodian, is a specialized financial institution responsible for providing securities services. It provides post-trade services and solutions for asset owners (e.g. sovereign wealth funds, central banks, insurance companies), asset managers, banks and broker-dealers. It is not engaged in "traditional" commercial or consumer/retail banking like lending.

In the past, the custodian bank purely focused on custody, safekeeping, settlement, and administration of securities as well as asset servicing such as income collection and corporate actions. Yet, in the modern financial world, custodian banks have started providing a wider range of value-adding or cost-saving financial services, ranging from fund administration to transfer agency, from securities lending to trustee services. (Full article...)

An ATM card is a dedicated payment card card issued by a financial institution (i.e. a bank) which enables a customer to access their financial accounts via its and others' automated teller machines (ATMs) and, in some countries, to make approved point of purchase retail transactions. ATM cards are not credit cards or debit cards, however most credit and debit cards can also act as ATM cards and that is the most common way that banks issue cards since the 2010s.

ATM cards are payment card size and style plastic cards with a magnetic stripe and/or a plastic smart card with a chip that contains a unique card number and some security information such as an expiration date or CVVC (CVV). ATM cards are known by a variety of names such as bank card, MAC (money access card), client card, key card or cash card, among others. Other payment cards, such as debit cards and credit cards can also function as ATM cards. Charge and proprietary cards cannot be used as ATM cards. The use of a credit card to withdraw cash at an ATM is treated differently to a point of sale transaction, usually attracting interest charges from the date of the cash withdrawal. (Full article...)

A time deposit or term deposit (also known as a certificate of deposit in the United States, and as a guaranteed investment certificate in Canada) is a deposit in a financial institution with a specific maturity date or a period to maturity, commonly referred to as its "term". Time deposits differ from at call deposits, such as savings or checking accounts, which can be withdrawn at any time, without any notice or penalty. Deposits that require notice of withdrawal to be given are effectively time deposits, though they do not have a fixed maturity date.

Unlike a certificate of deposit and bonds, a time deposit is generally not negotiable; it is not transferable by the depositor, so that depositors need to deal with the financial institution when they need to prematurely cash out of the deposit. (Full article...)

The Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), also known as AgBank, is a Chinese partially state-owned multinational banking and financial services corporation headquartered in Beijing, China. It is one of the "big four" banks in China, and the second largest bank in the world by total assets, behind the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. ABC was founded on 10 July 1951, and has its headquarters in Dongcheng District, Beijing. It has branches throughout mainland China, Hong Kong, London, Tokyo, New York, Frankfurt, Sydney, Seoul, and Singapore.

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 Arabian state-run petroleum 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...)

Société Générale S.A. (French: [sɔsjete ʒeneʁal]), colloquially known in English-speaking countries as SocGen (pronounced [sɔk ʒɛn]), is a French multinational universal bank and financial services company founded in 1864. It is registered in downtown Paris and headquartered nearby in La Défense.

Société Générale is France's third largest bank by total assets after BNP Paribas and Crédit Agricole. It is also the sixth largest bank in Europe and the world's eighteenth. It is considered to be a systemically important bank by the Financial Stability Board. It has been designated as a Significant Institution since the entry into force of European Banking Supervision in late 2014, and as a consequence is directly supervised by the European Central Bank. (Full article...)

Toronto-Dominion Bank (French: Banque Toronto-Dominion), doing business as TD Bank Group (Groupe Banque TD), is a Canadian multinational banking and financial services corporation headquartered in Toronto, Ontario. The bank was created on February 1, 1955, through the merger of the Bank of Toronto and the Dominion Bank, which were founded in 1855 and 1869, respectively. It is one of two Big Five banks of Canada founded in Toronto, the other being the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

In 2021, according to Standard & Poor's, TD Bank Group was the largest bank in Canada by total assets and also by market capitalization, a top 10 bank in North America, and the 23rd largest bank in the world. In 2019, it was designated a global systemically important bank by the Financial Stability Board. In 2023, the company was ranked 43rd in the Forbes Global 2000. (Full article...)

The Central Bank of the Russian Federation (Russian: Центральный банк Российской Федерации), commonly known as the Bank of Russia (Russian: Банк России), also called the Central Bank of Russia (CBR), is the central bank of the Russian Federation. The bank was established on 13 July 1990. It traces its beginnings to the State Bank of the Russian Empire established in 1860.

The bank is headquartered on Neglinnaya Street in Moscow. Its functions are described in the Constitution of Russia (Article 75), as well as in federal law. (Full article...)

State Bank of India (SBI) is an Indian multinational public sector bank and financial service body headquartered in Mumbai. It is the largest bank in India with a 23% market share by assets and a 25% share of the total loan and deposits market. It is also the tenth largest employer in India with nearly 250,000 employees. As of 2024, SBI has 50 crore customers.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has identified SBI, HDFC Bank, and ICICI Bank as Domestic Systemically Important Banks (D-SIBs), which are often referred to as banks that are "too big to fail". SBI is the 47th largest bank in the world by total assets and ranked 178th in the Fortune Global 500 list of the world's biggest corporations of 2024, being the only Indian bank on the list. In 2024, SBI was ranked 55th in Forbes Global 2000. (Full article...)

The European Central Bank (ECB) is the central component of the Eurosystem and the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) as well as one of seven institutions of the European Union. It is one of the world's most important central banks with a balance sheet total of around 7 trillion.

The ECB Governing Council makes monetary policy for the Eurozone and the European Union, administers the foreign exchange reserves of EU member states, engages in foreign exchange operations, and defines the intermediate monetary objectives and key interest rate of the EU. The ECB Executive Board enforces the policies and decisions of the Governing Council, and may direct the national central banks when doing so. The ECB has the exclusive right to authorise the issuance of euro banknotes. Member states can issue euro coins, but the volume must be approved by the ECB beforehand. The bank also operates the T2 (RTGS) payments system. (Full article...)

ABN AMRO Bank N.V. is the third-largest Dutch bank, with headquarters in Amsterdam. It was initially formed in 1991 by merger of the two prior Dutch banks that form its name, Algemene Bank Nederland (ABN) and Amsterdamsche en Rotterdamsche Bank (AMRO Bank).

Following aggressive international expansion, ABN AMRO was acquired and broken up in 2007–2008 by a consortium of European banks, including Fortis which intended to take over its formed operations in the Benelux region. Fortis came under stress in the autumn of 2008, and was in turn broken up into separate national entities; the Dutch operations, namely Fortis Bank Nederland and the former ABN AMRO activities that Fortis had planned to absorb, were nationalized, restructured, and renamed ABN AMRO in mid-2010. On 20 November 2015, the Dutch government publicly re-listed the company through an IPO and sold 20 percent of the shares to the public. (Full article...)

Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD) (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈkajʃɐ ʒɨˈɾal dɨ ðɨˈpɔzituʃ]) is a Portuguese state-owned banking corporation, and the largest bank in Portugal, established in Lisbon in 1876.

CGD now has presence in 23 countries spanning four continents through branches, representative offices or direct equity interests in local financial institutions. CGD is the largest Portuguese financial group, with the highest domestic market shares in key areas such as customer deposits, loans and advances to customers, mortgages, insurance, mutual funds and real estate leasing (11.4%). Based on assets, it ranks 109 in terms of the world's major banks. CGD is the 69th largest European bank. (Full article...)

Danske Bank A/S (pronounced [ˈtænˀskə ˈpɑŋˀk], lit. 'Danish Bank') is a Danish multinational banking and financial services corporation. Headquartered in Copenhagen, it is the largest bank in Denmark and a major retail bank in the northern European region with over 5 million retail customers. Danske Bank was number 454 on the Fortune Global 500 list for 2011. The largest shareholder with 21% of the share capital is A.P. Moller Holding, the investment holding company of the Maersk family.

It was founded 5 October 1871 as Den Danske Landmandsbank, Hypothek- og Vexelbank i Kjøbenhavn ("The Danish Farmers' Bank, Mortgage and Exchange Bank of Copenhagen"), and was commonly known as Landmandsbanken ("the Farmers' Bank"). In 1976, the bank changed name to Den Danske Bank ("The Danish Bank"), and the current name was adopted in 2000. (Full article...)

Crédit Agricole Group (French: [kʁedi aɡʁikɔl]), sometimes called La banque verte (pronounced [la bɑ̃k vɛʁt], lit. 'The green bank', due to its historical ties to farming), is a French international banking group and the world's largest cooperative financial institution. It is the second largest bank in France, after BNP Paribas, as well as the third largest in Europe and tenth largest in the world. It consists of a network of Crédit Agricole local banks, 39 Agricole regional banks and a central institute, the Crédit Agricole S.A.. It is listed through Crédit Agricole S.A., as an intermediate holding company, on Euronext Paris' first market and is part of the CAC 40 stock market index. Local banks of the group owned the regional banks, in turn the regional banks majority owned the S.A. via a holding company, in turn the S.A. owned part of the subsidiaries of the group, such as LCL, the Italian network and the CIB unit. It is considered to be a systemically important bank by the Financial Stability Board.

It was the title sponsor of the Crédit Agricole professional road cycling team from 1998 to 2008. (Full article...)