Bank Management

Deposit Fund

The first thing you need to do when you have acquired a new Bank, is to open the Deposit Fund. This is a repository for money that circulates through the bank. When account customers put money onto their accounts, it ends up in the Deposit Fund. When they take out money from their accounts, it is drawn from the Deposit Fund. When customers take loans it is drawn from the Deposit Fund. When they pay back their loans through their payment plans, it is paid back into the Deposit Fund.

In order to get a quick start and become able to loan money to your customers without having to wait for other customers to open and fill accounts, you can make a payment to the Deposit Fund.

However, putting money into the Deposit Fund means locking up money for a looooong time. In fact, you cannot get the money back until all bank accounts have been closed! So, effectively, this money is stuck until you close down the bank. And that is the whole point with the Deposit Fund: you guarantee the money for your customers.

It is important to note that it is only account balances and loans that are concerned with the Deposit Fund. Account interests are paid from the locale cash (not the Deposit Fund) and loan interest paid by your customers also go to the locale cash (not the Deposit Fund). Interest is your income and costs.

Bank products

A bank product is a set of standard rules for new accounts or loans. For the most basic type of bank, you simply set up one loan product and one account product. You can add additional products of each type later on if you want to.

When you create your product, you set the interest rate, the upper limit, and (if it is a loan) the number of weeks the loan should be paid back in.

You can change these parameters at any time. When you do, you only affect loans/account opened after that. Only the Upper Limit parameter can be changed for existing loans and accounts.

Accepting loans

As the bank manager of a private bank, your primary job is to reject and accept loan applications. Please don't keep customers waiting for too long. Ideally you check the list of pending applications at least a few times per week.

One word of advice: Don't be too soft!

If you are unsure if the customer is reliable, then don't accept his loan application. Be aware that a lot of newbies will apply for loans. Are they clones? Will they remain in the game long enough to pay back the money? In these and many other cases, the character may end up unable to pay the loan. If they cannot pay, they will end up in jail - but that will not give you the bank's money back. Instead, if they go to jail they are probably even less likely to be able to pay you back.

That said, the only way for a bank to earn money is to give loans, so eventually you will need to find customers that you decide to trust.

The Reserve Ratio

This number indicates how much of the sum of all its customer's savings accounts the bank has in its deposit fund. A 100% reserve ratio means the bank has enough money in its deposit to make sure all its customers can access their money even if they all decided to withdraw their savings at the same time. If the reserve ratio was as low as 50%, the bank would only be able to pay back half of the money its customers has placed in the bank. Needless to say, a fine bank should have a reserve ratio of 100%.

The mayor of the city where a bank is located can set a minimum reserve ratio requirement for banks to lend money to its customers. A bank which has a reserve ratio that's less than the required will not be able to lend out any more money until the reserve ratio requirement has been met.

The Death of Customers

A bank will not gain any money when customers die. Whenever a bank customer dies all of the deceased's savings placed in bank accounts around the world will be withdrawn from the deposit funds of the affected banks. The cash withdrawn, together with the available character cash, will be used to pay back as much as possible of any eventual bank loans remaining.

This means that the death of extremely wealthy people can affect the deposit fund and reserve ratio of a bank greatly! Keep this in mind when granting loans to people. If you've lent people a lot of money and your favorite account holder Scrooge McDuck suddenly dies your reserve ratio might plummet to the ground as swiftly as if Smaug the dragon had paid you an unwanted visit.