Banking & Financial Awareness Quiz: Headquarters and Taglines of Banks

The correct answer is B, Mumbai. The Reserve Bank of India has had its central office at Bombay, now Mumbai, since 1937, and it has stayed there ever since. Option A is wrong, but it is the strongest distractor, because the Reserve Bank was established on 1 April 1935 with its central office at Calcutta, and the office was moved two years later; a question that asks where the Reserve Bank was first located does take Kolkata as the answer. Option C is wrong because New Delhi is the seat of the central government and of the finance ministry, not of the central bank. Option D is wrong because Chennai is the headquarters of Indian Bank and Indian Overseas Bank, two public sector banks, but not of the Reserve Bank.

The correct answer is C, Vadodara. Bank of Baroda has its head office at Vadodara in Gujarat, the city formerly called Baroda, from which the bank takes its name, and that link between the name and the city is the simplest way to remember the fact. Option A is wrong because Mumbai is the headquarters of the State Bank of India, Bank of India, Union Bank of India and Central Bank of India, and a candidate who guesses Mumbai for every bank will get this one wrong. Option B is wrong because Ahmedabad is the largest city of Gujarat but is not the seat of this bank. Option D is wrong because Surat, also in Gujarat, has no public sector bank headquartered in it. Bank of Baroda is also the one public sector bank with Gujarat as its base, which is a useful way to fix it against the four Mumbai banks.

The correct answer is B, Bank of Baroda. India's International Bank is the line by which Bank of Baroda is best known, and it reflects the bank's long presence in overseas markets. Option A is wrong because the State Bank of India is known by the lines The Banker to Every Indian and Pure Banking, Nothing Else. Option C is wrong because Bank of India uses Relationship Beyond Banking, and the similarity of the two names, Bank of Baroda and Bank of India, is what makes this question worth setting. Option D is wrong because Indian Overseas Bank uses Good People to Grow With; the word overseas in its name tempts a candidate towards it in a question about an international bank, which is exactly the trap.

The correct answer is C, New Delhi. Punjab National Bank is headquartered at New Delhi, as is Punjab and Sind Bank, so both the public sector banks with Punjab in their names are based in the capital rather than in the state. Option A is wrong because Chandigarh, though the capital of Punjab and Haryana, has no public sector bank headquartered in it. Option B is wrong because Amritsar is the city where Punjab National Bank was founded in the late nineteenth century, which makes it the most tempting wrong answer in this set. Option D is wrong because Ludhiana is the largest industrial city of Punjab but is not the seat of either bank. The lesson is that the name of a bank points to its origin, not always to its present head office.

The correct answer is A, Kolkata. UCO Bank is headquartered at Kolkata and is the public sector bank most often asked about in connection with that city; its tagline is Honours Your Trust. Option B is wrong because Mumbai holds the State Bank of India, Bank of India, Union Bank of India and Central Bank of India among the public sector banks, as well as most of the large private banks. Option C is wrong because Bhubaneswar, the capital of Odisha, has no public sector bank headquartered in it. Option D is wrong because Patna, the capital of Bihar, likewise has none. Grouping the banks by city, with Mumbai holding four, Chennai two, New Delhi two and Kolkata one, is the fastest way to answer this whole family of questions.

The correct answer is B, Bengaluru. Canara Bank has its head office at Bengaluru in Karnataka, and its tagline is Together We Can. Option A is wrong, though it is the best distractor, because the bank was founded at Mangaluru on the Karnataka coast, and the name Canara itself comes from that coastal region; the head office, however, is at Bengaluru. Option C is wrong because Chennai is the seat of Indian Bank and Indian Overseas Bank. Option D is wrong because Hyderabad, though a major financial centre, has no public sector bank headquartered in it after the amalgamations of 2019 and 2020. As with Punjab National Bank, the city of origin and the present head office are two different facts, and questions are set on both.

The correct answer is A, Indian Bank and Indian Overseas Bank. Both Indian Bank, whose tagline is Your Own Bank, and Indian Overseas Bank, whose tagline is Good People to Grow With, are headquartered at Chennai, and their similar names make them easy to keep together. Option B is wrong because Canara Bank is headquartered at Bengaluru, not Chennai. Option C is wrong because UCO Bank is headquartered at Kolkata. Option D is wrong because Bank of India is headquartered at Mumbai. The pairing to hold is that Chennai has two public sector banks whose names both begin with the word Indian, which is the quickest check available in the examination hall. Both banks grew out of the banking movement of the Madras Presidency in the early twentieth century, which is why their names and their city coincide, and an examiner will usually pair one of them with a bank from another city to test whether the candidate knows both.

The correct answer is C, Pune. Bank of Maharashtra is headquartered at Pune, and its tagline is One Family One Bank. Option A is wrong, and it is the trap this question is built on, because Mumbai is the capital of Maharashtra and the financial capital of the country, so a candidate who reasons from the name of the bank alone will choose it; Mumbai holds four other public sector banks but not this one. Option B is wrong because Nagpur is the second capital of the state, where the winter session of the legislature is held, but has no bank headquartered in it. Option D is wrong because Nashik, though the home of the India Security Press and a currency note press, is not the seat of this bank.

The correct answer is B, State Bank of India. The State Bank of India, the largest bank in the country, is known by the line The Banker to Every Indian, and it has also used Pure Banking, Nothing Else. Option A is wrong because Punjab National Bank uses The Name You Can Bank Upon. Option C is wrong because Union Bank of India uses Good People to Bank With, a line often confused with the Good People to Grow With of Indian Overseas Bank, so those two should be learnt as a pair. Option D is wrong because Central Bank of India, despite its name, is not the central bank of the country; the central bank is the Reserve Bank of India, and that confusion is itself a favourite question.

The correct answer is B, Lucknow. SIDBI, the Small Industries Development Bank of India, is headquartered at Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, and it is the one major development financial institution not based in Mumbai, which is precisely why it is asked so often. Option A is wrong because Mumbai is the headquarters of NABARD, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, and of the Export-Import Bank of India, so a candidate who assumes all such institutions are in Mumbai will be caught here. Option C is wrong because New Delhi holds Punjab National Bank and Punjab and Sind Bank but no development bank of this kind. Option D is wrong because Kanpur, though a large industrial city of the same state, is not the seat of SIDBI.

The correct answer is A, Punjab National Bank. The Name You Can Bank Upon is the line by which Punjab National Bank is best known, and the bank is headquartered at New Delhi. Option B is wrong because Canara Bank, based at Bengaluru, uses Together We Can. Option C is wrong because UCO Bank, based at Kolkata, uses Honours Your Trust, and the two lines are similar enough in sense that they are often interchanged. Option D is wrong because Bank of India, based at Mumbai, uses Relationship Beyond Banking. A bank may change its tagline when its advertising changes, but these are the lines by which each bank has long been known and on which examination questions have been set. Learning the tagline together with the head office, as in Punjab National Bank at New Delhi with The Name You Can Bank Upon, means one effort answers two kinds of question.