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...)
Community development bank (CDB) or Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) is a development bank or credit union that focus on serving people who have been locked out of the traditional financial systems such as the unbanked or underbanked in deprived local communities. They emphasize the long term development of communities and provide loans such as micro-finance or venture capital.
In the United States these became popular after 1994 when the US Congress created community development banks and allowed them to get funding at very low rates from the US treasury. (Full article...)
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The 2010 United States foreclosure crisis, sometimes referred to as Foreclosure-gate or Foreclosuregate, refers to a widespread epidemic of improper foreclosures initiated by large banks and other lenders. The foreclosure crisis was extensively covered by news outlets beginning in October 2010, and several large banks—including Bank of America, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup—responded by halting their foreclosure proceedings temporarily in some or all states. The foreclosure crisis caused significant investor fear in the U.S. A 2014 study published in the American Journal of Public Health linked the foreclosure crisis to an increase in suicide rates.
One out of every 248 households in the United States received a foreclosure notice in September 2012, according to RealtyTrac. (Full article...)
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Private banks are banks owned by either the individual or a general partner(s) with limited partner(s). Private banks are not incorporated. In any such case, creditors can look to both the "entirety of the bank's assets" as well as the entirety of the sole-proprietor's/general-partners' assets.
Central banks in most developed nations are usually set up to be institutionally independent from political interference, even though governments typically have governance rights over them, legislative bodies exercise scrutiny, and central banks frequently do show responsiveness to politics. (Full article...)
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MAC (Money Access Card) ATM Card 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...)
Islamic banking, Islamic finance (Arabic: مصرفية إسلاميةmasrifiyya 'islamia), or Sharia-compliant finance is banking or financing activity that complies with Sharia (Islamic law) and its practical application through the development of Islamic economics. Some of the modes of Islamic finance include mudarabah (profit-sharing and loss-bearing), wadiah (safekeeping), musharaka (joint venture), murabahah (cost-plus), and ijarah (leasing).
Sharia prohibits riba, or usury, generally defined as interest paid on all loans of money (although some Muslims dispute whether there is a consensus that interest is equivalent to riba). Investment in businesses that provide goods or services considered contrary to Islamic principles (e.g. pork or alcohol) is also haram ("sinful and prohibited"). (Full article...)
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An automated clearing house (ACH) is a computer-based electronic network for processing transactions, usually domestic low value payments, between participating financial institutions. It may support both credit transfers and direct debits. The ACH system is designed to process batches of payments containing numerous transactions, and it charges fees low enough to encourage its use for low-value payments. (Full article...)
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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...)
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Depositors "run" on a failing New York City bank in an effort to recover their money, July 1914 A bank failure occurs when a bank is unable to meet its obligations to its depositors or other creditors because it has become insolvent or too illiquid to meet its liabilities. A bank usually fails economically when the market value of its assets declines to a value that is less than the market value of its liabilities. The insolvent bank either borrows from other solvent banks or sells its assets at a lower price than its market value to generate liquid money to pay its depositors on demand. The inability of the solvent banks to lend liquid money to the insolvent bank creates a bank panic among the depositors as more depositors try to take out cash deposits from the bank. As such, the bank is unable to fulfill the demands of all of its depositors on time. A bank may be taken over by the regulating government agency if its shareholders' equity are below the regulatory minimum.
The failure of a bank is generally considered to be of more importance than the failure of other types of business firms because of the interconnectedness and fragility of banking institutions. Research has shown that the market value of customers of the failed banks is adversely affected at the date of the failure announcements. It is often feared that the spill over effects of a failure of one bank can quickly spread throughout the economy and possibly result in the failure of other banks, whether or not those banks were solvent at the time as the marginal depositors try to take out cash deposits from these banks to avoid from suffering losses. Thereby, the spill over effect of bank panic or systemic risk has a multiplier effect on all banks and financial institutions leading to a greater effect of bank failure in the economy. As a result, banking institutions are typically subjected to rigorous regulation, and bank failures are of major public policy concern in countries across the world. (Full article...)
Many subsidiaries, such as Abbey National, have been rebranded under the Santander name. The company is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50stock market index. In June 2023, Santander was ranked as 49th in the Forbes Global 2000 list of the world's biggest public companies. In 2023, the company was ranked 49th in the Forbes Global 2000. Santander is Spain's largest bank. (Full article...)
Since 2010, Crédit Agricole has been headquartered in a remodeled former Schlumberger plant in Montrouge, known as Campus Evergreen
Crédit Agricole Group (French:[kʁedit‿aɡʁikɔl]), sometimes called La banque verte (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.
The Central Bank of the Russian Federation (Russian: Центральный банк Российской Федерации), which brands itself as Bank of Russia (Russian: Банк России) and is also commonly referred to in English as the Central Bank of Russia (CBR), is the central bank of the Russian Federation. The bank was established on July 13, 1990. It claims the legacy of the State Bank of the Russian Empire (1860-1920) and of the Soviet Gosbank (1921-1992), even though both institutions covered a significant larger territorial scope.
The Bank of Estonia (Estonian: Eesti Pank) is the Estonian member of the Eurosystem and has been the monetary authority for Estonia from 1919 to 2010, albeit with a long suspension between 1940 and 1991, issuing the Estonian kroon. The bank doesn't translate its name to English but uses its Estonian name Eesti Pank in all English communications. (Full article...)
In the years leading up to the failure, Bear Stearns was heavily involved in securitization and issued large amounts of asset-backed securities which were, in the case of mortgages, pioneered by Lewis Ranieri, "the father of mortgage securities." As investor losses mounted in those markets in 2006 and 2007, the company actually increased its exposure, especially to the mortgage-backed assets that were central to the subprime mortgage crisis. In March 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York provided an emergency loan to try to avert a sudden collapse of the company. The company could not be saved, however, and was sold to JPMorgan Chase for $10 per share, a price far below its pre-crisis 52-week high of $133.20 per share, but not as low as the $2 per share originally agreed upon. (Full article...)
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Chemical's logo, adopted from Manufacturers Hanover after the banks' merger
Chemical Bank was a bank with headquarters in New York City from 1824 until 1996. At the end of 1995, Chemical was the third-largest bank in the U.S., with about $182.9 billion in assets and more than 39,000 employees around the world.
Image 6Statesman 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)
Image 7Interior of the Helsinki Branch of the Vyborg-Bank [fi] in the 1910s (from Bank)