Since banks have to manage the financial assets of their clients, a tight control of the treatment will consist in steering the flows and updating the stocks.
Financial Function is to ensure the perenniality of the bank and keep it solvent; it has three main functions:
To ensure that accounting information can be trusted and is in accordance with regulations: it is the accounting function.
Human resources department
Life in a social unit like a bank is timed by the ins and outs of employees, internal mobility and promotion linked to career management, and also to a dialogue with social representatives.
To manage a bank, General Management depends on various functions:
To check the respect of internal and external regulations
To check the efficiency of procedures
Banks have the monopoly of the creation of means of payment necessary to the circulation of capital between economic agents. It can be cheques or credit-cards or even more sophisticated systems; their production and management are very complex and costly and need an adequate technological structure.
Presentation and evolution
Because of diversity in the structures of credit institutions and in the Banking professions, it’s quite difficult to propose a simple and complete definition of what a bank is.
Commercial banks and investment banks
1. Commercial Banks
These are usually large or medium sized banks, including a network of branches covering all or part of the national territory; most of them have an international activity through subsidiaries or representative offices.
The statutory framework
In every country, bank activities are strictly regulated.
Why is this necessary? What is the content of the regulation? Such questions have to be answered.
The word «credit» has different meanings; first, it is money lending, or a promise of money lending; when a Bank gives a credit limit to a customer in any form, its risk equals the amount of this limit even if the customer has not (or only) partially used this credit.
This concerns collecting deposits on current account and savings accounts. Banks have no monopoly on this activity, as for example post-offices other merchant services and Insurance companies and pension funds are also entitled to collect public savings.
