Wholesale Banking

Wholesale banking deals in large transactions and specialised services. These can include large loans, often shared among several banks; cash management for companies operating in many countries; trade finance; foreign exchange; and access to financial markets.

The term also refers to banks borrowing and lending large sums among themselves, in what is called the wholesale funding market. Banks use this market to manage their day-to-day cash needs and to fund lending.

For example, a multinational company might use a bank's wholesale banking division to manage cash across twenty countries, arrange a 500 million loan and protect itself against currency movements.

Wholesale banking contrasts with retail banking, which serves individual consumers with everyday products such as current accounts and mortgages. Wholesale clients are generally considered more financially sophisticated, so wholesale banking is subject to different regulations and has less consumer protection than retail banking.