Banking GK Questions 2026

The Securities and Exchange Board of India was first constituted in April 1988 as a non-statutory body with advisory functions, and it received statutory powers through the Securities and Exchange Board of India Act 1992, passed in the year the securities scam made a strong market regulator unavoidable.

IRDAI began in New Delhi but its office was shifted to Hyderabad in 2001, and this move is exactly why the question is asked: the candidate who assumes that every financial regulator sits in Mumbai or Delhi gets it wrong.

Formally the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance, it reported in 1926 and recommended a central bank separate from the Imperial Bank of India; the recommendation led to the Reserve Bank of India Act 1934, and the Bank began work on 1 April 1935 with its central office at…

The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India is the statutory regulator of insurance, created under the IRDA Act 1999 after the Malhotra Committee recommended opening the sector to private and foreign capital; it licenses life, general, health and reinsurance companies and registers agents, brokers and surveyors, and its headquarters…

The green pheasant, which is found only in Japan, was designated its national bird by the country's ornithological society, and the bird appears in Japanese folk tales as a companion of the boy hero Momotaro.

The flag of Nepal is made of two stacked triangular pennants, the upper carrying a white moon and the lower a white sun, and its proportions are laid down by a geometrical construction in the constitution, which makes it unique among national flags.

Scotland has used the unicorn in its royal arms since the fifteenth century, reading it as a symbol of purity and of a strength that cannot be captured, and it is the only mythical animal among the national animals usually asked.

The beaver was given official standing as a symbol of Canada because the fur trade in beaver pelts drove the early European exploration and settlement of the country, and the animal appears on the five-cent coin.

The king protea is the largest flower of the protea family, which grows in the fynbos vegetation of the Cape, and South Africa's national cricket team takes its name from it.

The markhor lives in the mountain ranges of the north and west of the country, and its spiralled horns make it easy to recognise in a picture-based question.

The takin is a heavily built goat-antelope of the eastern Himalayas, and Bhutan ties it to a legend about a saint who joined the head of a goat to the bones of a cow.

Nepal declares the cow its national animal, and the choice follows from its religious standing in the country.

The bald eagle has been the national bird and the central figure of the Great Seal of the United States since 1782, and the bison was later adopted as the national mammal.

It is the largest marsupial of the continent and appears on the coat of arms of Australia along with the emu, the two chosen because neither animal can easily walk backwards, which was read as a country always moving forward.

Muhammad Yunus built the bank on the idea that very small loans without collateral, given mostly to women organised in groups that guarantee one another, are repaid reliably, and the Nobel Peace Prize of 2006 was awarded jointly to him and to the bank.

The National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development launched the programme as a pilot in 1992, connecting savings groups, mostly of women, directly to bank branches for credit, and by the number of households covered it became the largest microfinance programme in the world.

The cap covers the repayment of all loans of the household taken together, not only the microfinance loan being considered, and the lender must assess household income and existing debt before sanctioning, which is the framework's main protection against over-indebtedness.

The framework defines a microfinance loan by the borrower's household income rather than by the size of the loan or the kind of lender, and the same definition applies to a bank, a small finance bank, an NBFC and an NBFC-MFI alike, which was the main reform the framework brought.

After the microfinance crisis in Andhra Pradesh in 2010, the Reserve Bank appointed a sub-committee of its central board under Y. H. Malegam to study the lending practices of microfinance institutions, and its report of January 2011 led to the NBFC-MFI being carved out as a distinct category with its…

A non-deposit-taking NBFC of that size is classified as systemically important, written as NBFC-ND-SI, and becomes subject to prudential norms on capital adequacy, exposure and disclosure that smaller companies escape.