Banking Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
161 free Banking trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 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 161 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Restoration king's 1672 'Stop of the Exchequer' ruined many London goldsmith-bankers?
Charles II
Charles II shut the Exchequer in January 1672, freezing more than £1 million owed to goldsmith-bankers; Edward Backwell, banker to Samuel Pepys and to the king himself, was owed nearly £300,000 and gave up banking.
Q 02What is the oldest existing retail bank in the world?
Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena
Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena began in 1472 as a civic pawn bank, set up by Siena's magistrates to lend to the city's poor at low interest, and is widely cited as the world's oldest surviving bank.
Q 03Which religious order championed the monti di pietà, charity pawn banks that spread across fifteenth-century Italy?
The Franciscans
The Franciscans preached against moneylenders' steep rates and raised the funds for monti di pietà, starting in Umbrian towns such as Perugia in the 1460s, so the poor could pawn goods for cheap loans.
Q 04Which Hamburg house, founded by brothers in 1590, is Germany's oldest private bank?
Berenberg
Berenberg began in Hamburg in 1590 not as a bank but as the cloth-trading business of brothers Hans and Paul Berenberg; financing other merchants grew out of the trade, and the house has operated ever since.
Q 05Which ancient lawgiver's code let a farmer skip a year's loan repayment if storm or drought ruined the harvest?
Hammurabi
Hammurabi, king of Babylon, had it carved in stone: a debtor whose crop failed could 'wash his debt-tablet in water' and owe no grain that year, one of many rules his code set for loans, interest and deposits.
Q 06Which medieval military order issued letters of credit to pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land?
The Knights Templar
The Knights Templar let a pilgrim leave money at one of their houses in Europe, such as London's Temple Church, and collect it in Jerusalem against a letter of credit, so there was no cash to steal on the road.
Q 07Which English king's unpaid war loans are traditionally blamed for ruining Florence's Bardi and Peruzzi banks in the 1340s?
Edward III
Edward III borrowed heavily from the Bardi and Peruzzi to fight the Hundred Years' War and never repaid in full; historians now add that costly ventures at home, including Florence's war with Lucca, also sank them.
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 is the Medici Bank often credited with refining?
Double-entry bookkeeping
Double-entry bookkeeping was not a Medici invention: Florentine merchants such as the Farolfi firm were keeping full debit-and-credit ledgers around 1300, almost a century before the bank opened in 1397.
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 seventeenth-century London goldsmiths issue in exchange for deposits of precious metal?
Receipts certifying quantity and purity
Goldsmiths' receipts certifying quantity and purity of the metal they held grew over time into notes payable on demand, the ancestors of the English banknote.
Q 12Which trading company borrowed heavily from the Bank of Amsterdam, breaking its rule of holding coin for every deposit?
Dutch East India Company
The Dutch East India Company was lent money again and again despite the rule that every deposit stayed in the vaults; when the bank's true state emerged in the 1790s, confidence in it collapsed and never returned.
Q 13Which central bank, older than England's, is the world's oldest still operating?
Q 21Which bank invented the overdraft in 1728 for an Edinburgh merchant?
Royal Bank of Scotland
Royal Bank of Scotland was only a year old in May 1728 when it agreed that merchant William Hog could overdraw whenever bills fell due before his own payments arrived; this 'cash credit' was the forerunner of the overdraft.
Q 22Which word for financial ruin comes from Italian words for a money-changer's 'broken counter'?
Bankrupt
Bankrupt comes from the Italian banca rotta, 'broken counter', said to recall the custom of smashing the trading table of a money-changer who could not pay his debts.
Q 23The person who writes a cheque is known as what?
The drawer
Sveriges Riksbank
Sveriges Riksbank rose in 1668 from the ruins of a failed private bank; this time parliament's estates, not a banker licensed by the king, were put in charge, and it has run without a break ever since.
Q 14Which private Swedish bank issued Europe's first banknotes in 1661, then collapsed after printing too many?
Stockholms Banco
Stockholms Banco, Johan Palmstruch's bank, printed far more notes than its coin could cover and stopped paying out in 1664; Palmstruch was sentenced to death for mismanagement in 1668, then reprieved.
Q 15The Bank of England was founded to fund a war against which country?
France
France was the enemy: William III needed £1.2 million for the Nine Years' War, and the subscribers who lent it were rewarded with a charter as the Governor and Company of the Bank of England.
Q 16William Paterson, the merchant who proposed the Bank of England in 1691, came from which country?
Scotland
Scotland's William Paterson, a Dumfriesshire farmer's son, saw his plan become the Bank of England in 1694, fell out with his fellow directors within a year, and went home to promote the disastrous Darien colony.
Q 17What is the Bank of England's nickname?
The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street
The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street comes from James Gillray's 1797 cartoon, drawn after the Bank was ordered to stop paying out gold: it shows Pitt the Younger wooing an old lady, the Bank, to get at her gold.
Q 18Whose government nationalised the Bank of England in 1946?
Clement Attlee
Clement Attlee's government took the Bank of England into public ownership on 1 March 1946, ending 252 years in private hands and giving ministers the power to appoint its governors and issue it directions.
Q 19To which country did the Bank of England secretly ship its gold for safekeeping in 1940?
Canada
Canada's central bank hid the gold in its Ottawa vaults after Operation Fish carried it across an Atlantic hunted by U-boats; not one gold-bearing ship was lost.
Q 20Which bank is Scotland's oldest?
Bank of Scotland
Bank of Scotland was founded in 1695, a year after its London counterpart, which had been created to lend to the crown for a war; the Scottish bank's founding act instead forbade it to lend to the king without parliament's consent.
The drawer writes and signs the cheque, which is legally an order telling the drawee, the bank, to pay the payee; if the drawer's account is short, the bank can refuse and the cheque bounces.
Q 24Where was the world's first ATM installed, on 27 June 1967?
Barclays Bank, Enfield, London
Barclays Bank in Enfield, north London, had TV comedy star Reg Varney make the first withdrawal; the machine took a special paper cheque marked with mildly radioactive carbon-14, not a card.
Q 25ATM pioneer John Shepherd-Barron cut his planned six-digit PIN to four after testing it on whom?
His wife
His wife Caroline told him over the kitchen table that four figures were the most she could remember, so his plan for a six-digit code, like his old army number, was dropped and four became the world standard.
Q 26Which name for an ATM is standard in Canada's financial industry?
An automated banking machine (ABM)
An automated banking machine (ABM) is the Canadian industry's term, used by the Canadian Bankers Association, though plenty of Canadians and Canadian firms simply say ATM.
Q 27What are cash machines not operated by a financial institution called?
White-label ATMs
White-label ATMs carry no bank's name: private businesses run them in shops, bars and petrol stations and live on a convenience fee charged on every withdrawal, part of which goes to the premises' owner.
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 set minimum capital ratios for banks, such as 8% of risk-weighted assets, yet they are not law: the committee's decisions bind no one until each country writes them into its own rules.
Q 30Which country's three biggest banks all collapsed within a week in 2008?
Iceland
Iceland's Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitnir had grown too big for the state to rescue, so it let them fail and later jailed many of their senior executives.