Web Trader MT5
The umbrella term for entities that take deposits, make loans, or provide payments services. The category is broader than most people realise, and it matters because different types of banks face different rules, risks, and regulators.
The main flavours: commercial banks (the ones with branches and your debit card), investment banks (capital raising, M&A, trading), universal banks (both, under one roof, JPMorgan, HSBC, BNP Paribas), savings banks and credit unions (mutual or cooperative ownership, retail focus), central banks (in a category of their own), development banks (World Bank, ADB, EIB, public mandate, long-tenor lending), and shadow banks (entities that do bank-like things without being banks, which is exactly the regulatory headache it sounds like).
Why the taxonomy matters: deposit insurance, capital rules, liquidity requirements, and crisis support all depend on what bucket an institution sits in. The 2008 crisis was largely a story of risk migrating from regulated commercial banks into the shadow-banking system, where the rules didn’t reach.
Example: When Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008, it wasn’t a deposit-taking commercial bank. It was an investment bank that had funded itself heavily through repo markets, a form of shadow banking. That distinction is partly why it failed: it had no deposits, no FDIC backstop, and no Fed discount window access.
