In Australia and New Zealand a few great banks provided local banking services, and in September 1931 they were still managing the exchanges as they had done for decades past. In New Zealand, until 1934 the banks also provided the paper currency. Gold could freely enter the country, but without official permission it could not leave. Hence the New Zealand pound could never rise above gold import point though in principle it might fall indefinitely. In Australia the banks had lost the right to issue their own paper money in 1910, when the government introduced its own treasury notes. In 1920 control was transferred to a local Notes Board and in 1924 to the Commonwealth Bank, a government owned institution that had also been set up as a trading bank in 1910. Although the legislation of 1924 was meant to encourage the evolution of the Commonwealth Bank into a central bank, neither then nor for several years thereafter was it more than a trading and savings bank that happened to have a monopoly of the note issue. In 1934, when New Zealand established its Reserve Bank, the New Zealand note issue was transferred from the trading banks to the Reserve Bank.

To a large extent the same trading banks operated in Australia and in New Zealand. Their London funds, therefore, were originally a support for all their Australasian business, and in 1930 they were still unable or unwilling to segregate their Australian business from their New Zealand affairs.