50 Pounds National Bank of New Zealand Limited

The National Bank of New Zealand Limited was a privately chartered London-incorporated bank, not a government institution, which is why its notes carry no Reserve Bank authority — New Zealand's central bank wasn't established until 1934. During the 1916–1921 window, the bank operated under the Banking Act of 1908, which permitted trading banks to issue their own currency, a privilege that would steadily erode through the 1930s.

Perkins, Bacon & Petch had been producing security printing for colonial banks and governments since the early nineteenth century, their intaglio work remaining the standard for fraud resistance in Australasian banking paper well into the interwar period. At the fifty-pound level, circulation would have been almost entirely interbank and mercantile — few private individuals ever handled one.