Banking Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
114 free Banking trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This banking trivia quiz is about banks themselves: how they began, who ran them, what they invented and how they failed (for markets, investing and personal money questions, try our Finance quiz instead). It covers the temple lenders of Sumer, the Knights Templar and Medici Florence, the goldsmiths of London, the world's oldest bank in Siena, and the great central banks: the Riksbank, the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, the ECB and the Bank of Japan. The easy questions are ones most people know: where the word 'bank' comes from, what the FDIC insures, what an ATM stands for and where the World Bank and IMF were born. From there it works through the innovations and the disasters: the first cash machine at Barclays Enfield, the first overdraft, pre-printed cheques, IBAN and SWIFT, Basel capital rules, Glass-Steagall and its repeal, the Bank of Amsterdam, the Rothschilds' Waterloo scoop, Nick Leeson and Barings, Northern Rock, the savings and loan crisis and the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. There are questions on the giants too: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and ICBC. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for the banks, institutions and events involved before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Money-minded players may also like our Economics and Stock Market quizzes.
30 of 114 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which English king's 1672 'Stop of the Exchequer' ruined many London goldsmith-bankers?
Charles II
Charles II's Stop of the Exchequer in January 1672 suspended repayment of government loans, bankrupting several London goldsmith-bankers who had lent the Crown their depositors' money.
Q 02What is the oldest existing retail bank in the world?
Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena
Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, founded in 1472 as a charitable pawn lender (monte di pietà), is widely cited as the world's oldest surviving bank.
Q 03Which Italian city saw the first Monte di Pietà, a charitable pawn lender, open in 1462?
Perugia
Perugia's Monte di Pietà, opened in 1462 with Franciscan preaching behind it, was the first of the charitable pawn banks that spread across Italy, lending small sums to the poor against pledges.
Q 04What is the world's oldest merchant banking house, founded around 1590?
Berenberg
Berenberg was founded in Hamburg in 1590 by the brothers Hans and Paul Berenberg, Protestant refugees from Antwerp, making it the world's oldest surviving merchant bank.
Q 05Roughly when did the first prototype banks give grain loans in Assyria, India and Sumer?
Around 2000 BCE
Around 2000 BCE, merchants in Assyria, Sumer and India made grain loans to farmers and traders, the earliest prototype banks; temple lenders followed in Greece and Rome.
Q 06Which medieval military order issued letters of credit to pilgrims from 1150?
The Knights Templar
The Knights Templar, from about 1150, let pilgrims deposit valuables at a local preceptory and draw funds in the Holy Land against a letter of credit, an early banking service.
Q 07Which two Florentine families dominated banking before going bankrupt in the 1340s?
Bardi and Peruzzi
The Bardi and Peruzzi, Florence's two largest banking houses, went bankrupt in 1346 and 1343 respectively after Edward III of England defaulted on enormous war loans.
Q 08Who founded the famous Florentine bank of 1397?
Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici
Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici founded the Medici Bank in Florence in 1397; his son Cosimo took it over on Giovanni's death in 1429.
Q 09Which accounting method did the Medici Bank help develop?
Double-entry bookkeeping
Double-entry bookkeeping records every transaction as a matching debit and credit; the Medici Bank's fifteenth-century ledgers are among the best-known early examples of the method.
Q 10Which two great banking families emerged in southern Germany in the 15th century?
The Fuggers and the Welsers
The Fuggers and the Welsers, both merchant houses of Augsburg, rose in the fifteenth century; Jakob Fugger bankrolled the Habsburg emperors, and the Welsers were granted Venezuela by Charles V in 1528.
Q 11What did London goldsmiths issue in exchange for deposits of precious metal in the 17th century?
Receipts certifying quantity and purity
Goldsmiths issued receipts certifying the quantity and purity of the metal deposited; these transferable 'goldsmiths' notes' were an ancestor of the modern banknote.
Q 12The Bank of Amsterdam, founded in 1609, was the first public bank to do what?
Offer accounts not convertible to coin
The Bank of Amsterdam (Wisselbank) offered ledger accounts not directly convertible to coin; this 'bank money' traded at a premium over coin, which is why some historians call it the first true central bank.
Q 13What is the world's oldest surviving central bank?
Q 21Who set up the first overdraft facility, in 1728?
Royal Bank of Scotland
Royal Bank of Scotland granted Edinburgh merchant William Hog a £1,000 'cash credit' in 1728, letting him draw more than he held, the first recorded overdraft.
Q 22Who is thought to have first personalised cheques with the account holder's name, in 1811?
Commercial Bank of Scotland
The Commercial Bank of Scotland is thought to have been first, in 1811, to personalise cheques by printing the account holder's name vertically along the left-hand edge.
Q 23The person who writes a cheque is known as what?
The drawer
Sveriges Riksbank
Sveriges Riksbank, established by the Swedish Riksdag in 1668 as Riksens Ständers Bank, is the world's oldest surviving central bank, predating the Bank of England by 26 years.
Q 14Which private bank preceded the Riksbank in Sweden and collapsed after issuing too many notes?
Stockholms Banco
Stockholms Banco, founded by Johan Palmstruch in 1657, issued Europe's first banknotes in 1661, printed far more than its reserves covered, and failed in 1664; the Riksbank replaced it in 1668.
Q 15In what year was the Bank of England established?
1694
The Bank of England was founded in 1694 by royal charter to raise £1.2 million for William III's war against France, acting from the start as the government's banker.
Q 16Which Scottish trader proposed the national bank that became the Bank of England?
William Paterson
William Paterson, a Scottish merchant, proposed the scheme in 1691; Parliament adopted it in 1694, and he served as one of the Bank of England's first directors.
Q 17What is the Bank of England's nickname?
The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street
The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street nickname comes from James Gillray's 1797 cartoon of Pitt the Younger wooing an old lady dressed in banknotes, seated on the Bank's gold chest.
Q 18In what year was the Bank of England nationalised?
1946
The Bank of England was nationalised on 1 March 1946 under Clement Attlee's Labour government, 252 years after its foundation as a private company.
Q 19Roughly how much gold did the Bank of England hold in its vaults as of 2016?
About 5,100 tonnes
The Bank of England's vaults held about 5,100 tonnes of gold in 2016, roughly 400,000 bars, most of it kept in custody for other central banks and institutions.
Q 20In what year did the Scottish Parliament establish Scotland's first bank?
1695
Bank of Scotland was founded by an Act of the Scottish Parliament in 1695, one year after the Bank of England, and is Scotland's oldest bank.
The drawer is the person who writes and signs the cheque; the bank on which it is drawn is the drawee, and the recipient is the payee.
Q 24Where was the world's first ATM installed, on 27 June 1967?
Barclays Bank, Enfield, London
Barclays installed the world's first cash machine at its Enfield branch in north London on 27 June 1967, beating a Swedish Bankomat in Uppsala by nine days.
Q 25Which engineer led the team at printing firm De La Rue credited with inventing the first cash machine?
John Shepherd-Barron
John Shepherd-Barron's team at De La Rue is credited with the first cash machine, and he was awarded an OBE in the 2005 New Year Honours.
Q 26What is an ATM commonly called in Canada?
An automated banking machine (ABM)
In Canada the machine is officially an automated banking machine (ABM), the term used by the Canadian Bankers Association, though ATM is also in everyday use.
Q 27What are cash machines not operated by a financial institution called?
White-label ATMs
White-label ATMs are machines owned and run by non-bank operators, such as independent deployers in shops and petrol stations, rather than by a financial institution.
Q 28Which reserve system lets a bank lend out most of the money its customers deposit?
Fractional-reserve banking
Fractional-reserve banking is the system most countries have institutionalised; the alternative, full-reserve banking, is hypothetical.
Q 29Which international standards set banks' minimum capital requirements?
The Basel Accords
The Basel Accords, issued by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, set minimum capital ratios for banks, such as 8% of risk-weighted assets; Basel III tightened the rules after the 2008 crisis.
Q 30In which year was Basel I first issued?
1988
Basel I, the first Basel Accord on bank capital, was issued by the Basel Committee in July 1988 and set an 8% minimum capital ratio; Basel II followed in 2004 and Basel III in 2010.