5 Pounds Bank of New Zealand

The Bank of New Zealand was incorporated by Act of the New Zealand General Assembly in 1861 and opened for business the following year, making this 5 Pounds note among the earliest issues of what would become the country's dominant commercial bank for most of the nineteenth century. Perkins, Bacon & Petch had by this point long refined the security printing techniques — particularly siderographic transfer engraving — that made their banknote work difficult to counterfeit and visually consistent across colonial issues worldwide.

New Zealand had no central bank and no uniform currency legislation in 1862; private banks issued their own notes freely, and public confidence depended heavily on the issuing bank's perceived solvency. The BNZ survived several colonial banking crises that claimed competitors, but required government intervention as late as 1895.