BANKS – THE SPECIFICITY OF FINANCIAL INTERMEDIATION

The global financial crisis has given some troubled banks at that time a frequently used epithet “too-big-tofail”, which tells how those banks became of systemic importance and their failure meant a real danger of the entire financial system collapsing so governments were saving them from bankruptcy with public money. This paper seeks the answer to the question whether there is something that banks can do which is not possible on the capital market? Is such attention paid to banks justified by their really special nature and do they actually perform some unique functions for which they cannot be replaced by other types of financial intermediaries? This article presents an overview of the research into whether banks are characterized by some specific features versus all other types of intermediaries. The results of the research show that banks have a specific position because of the services they provide - they facilitate payment transactions; they are a source of liquidity to all other economic entities and the channel of the monetary transmission mechanism; they improve efficiency of savings allocation through the transformation of maturity, risk and size of capital, thus affecting the formation of the cost of capital; they participate in the creation of money, etc. At the end of this paper, it is concluded that the specialty of banks cannot be substituted by bonds on the capital market, but the possible replacement of existing money with its digital form and the introduction of the direct monetary transmission mechanism could change the bank's special status in the financial system.