20 Pounds Commercial Bank of New Zealand Ltd.

The Commercial Bank of New Zealand Limited was founded in London in 1866 and largely operated as a British colonial venture managing pastoral and mercantile accounts — a £20 denomination was never a retail instrument. Notes of this value moved between stations, merchant houses, and the bank's own branches, not through ordinary hands.

Perkins, Bacon & Petch were the dominant security printers for colonial currency throughout the mid-Victorian period, and their siderographic process — transferring engraved designs via a hardened steel roller — made counterfeiting genuinely difficult at a time when New Zealand had no central authority to police it. The bank itself was wound up in 1893 following insolvency, and surviving notes from the earliest issue years are rare simply because so few were printed and fewer still survived the receivership.