The Bankr manual

01Getting started

Bankr drops you in charge of a bank. Your job is to keep it solvent, profitable, and compliant — and to grow it from where it starts to wherever your strategy takes you. Every number you see on screen comes from a real-time simulation of your balance sheet.

On launch you'll see the Main Menu: Continue, New, Load, Theme, Quit. Pick New to start.

02The Charter wizard

Before play begins you'll go through a six-step Charter wizard:

1. Bank name & CEO name — who you are and what your bank is called.
2. Mode — Owner (sandbox) or Intern (career).
3. Starting capital — a slider from $50M to $2B. Bigger means more breathing room and less aggressive play. Smaller means tighter margins and more leverage on every decision.
4. Archetype — Retail, Corporate, Investment, Wealth, or Universal. This shapes your opening loan book and deposit mix.
5. Scenario — the macro environment. See the Scenarios section.
6. HQ city & district — biases demand, deposit availability, and rival pressure.

The wizard ends with a five-question personality quiz that sets four axes and seeds seven gameplay multipliers (see the Personality section).

03The Dashboard

The Dashboard is your home screen during a run. It has three parts:

• Top-bar KPIs — Cash, Total Assets, Equity, Quarter-to-date P&L, CAR, NPL, LCR. Always visible.
• Tabbed main panel — Portfolio, Credit, Markets, Operations. Switch between them to see different slices of the bank.
• Modal entries — Divisions, M&A, Career, Products, Capital, Events, Achievements, Decisions, Personality, Save/Load. These are full-screen overlays you open as needed.

Time advances day by day. Months close on day 30. Quarters close on months 1, 4, 7, and 10 — at quarter-close, a Quarterly Report is generated and pushed to your Events inbox.

04Credit & loans

The Credit panel is where most of your decisions happen. Loan applications come in continuously and age out if you don't act on them. For each one you can:

• Approve — book the loan at the proposed terms.
• Decline — pass.
• Counter — change the rate or amount and offer back.

Once a loan is on the books, it accrues interest every tick and moves through stages per IFRS 9:

You can also manually write off bad loans early to clean up the portfolio.

Loan kinds in the game: Mortgage, Auto, SME, Corporate, Commercial Real Estate, Credit Card, Personal.

05Deposits & treasury

Loans need funding. Most of yours comes from deposits. The Treasury tab lets you set rates on each deposit type — higher rates pull more deposits but cost more in interest expense.

Deposit categories: Checking, Savings, Money Market, CDs (3M / 6M / 1Y / 2Y / 5Y), Brokered CDs.

Treasury also handles:

• Securities — buy and sell investment securities to absorb excess cash or generate yield.
• Borrowings — draw or repay short-term wholesale funding when deposits aren't enough.

06Ratios & the regulator

The regulator watches a handful of ratios every tick. Drift below their thresholds and you get warnings. Stay below long enough and you'll be seized — game over.

07Divisions

Once you've got room on the balance sheet, you can unlock divisions. Each division adds new revenue lines and changes how the bank allocates capital:

• Corporate — large-cap lending and treasury services.
• Mortgage — dedicated mortgage origination at scale.
• Private Banking — high-net-worth clients.
• Investment Banking — advisory and underwriting fees.
• Private Equity — direct investments.
• Wealth Management — fee-based asset management.
• Insurance — premium income, reserve management.

08Mergers & acquisitions

The M&A modal lets you run due diligence on a target and structure an offer. Targets can accept, counter, or reject.

You're also a target for rivals. When a hostile bid comes in, you have four defensive responses. Pick wrong and you get bought — pick right and you might bleed the attacker dry instead.

09Products

Two product lines are launchable from the Products modal:

• Card programs — credit cards with their own fee, default, and interchange profiles. Launch and close them as the cycle moves.
• Investment funds — funds with allocation strategies. They generate management fees and reflect their underlying performance.

10Owner mode vs. Intern mode

Owner mode is sandbox. You run the bank. There are no scripted objectives — survive, grow, and decide for yourself what winning means.

Intern mode is career. Pick a path — Credit Analyst, Treasurer, Banker, or Trader — and work up through ranks. There's a capstone evaluation at the end of the path that assesses how you played.

11Scenarios

Scenarios shape the macro environment for the entire run:

• Growth Sprint — easy mode. Demand is high, defaults are low.
• Stable Years — normal mode. Realistic baseline.
• Regulatory Crunch — the regulator is tight. CAR pressure is constant.
• Global Shock — periodic crises. NPLs spike, liquidity dries up.
• High Stakes — the hardest. Everything bites.

12The personality system

A five-question quiz at the start of the run sets four personality axes (e.g. risk tolerance, social orientation, time horizon, ethical flexibility). Those axes resolve to one of twelve archetypes, which in turn seeds seven gameplay multipliers.

Practical effect: two players starting the same scenario with the same starting capital will have meaningfully different runs because their underlying gameplay multipliers diverge.

13Saving & loading

Saves live in:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/com.bankr.app/saves/
• Windows: %APPDATA%\com.bankr.app\saves\

Three manual slots — save1, save2, save3 — plus an autosave that's written every month-end.

14Tips for new players

• Don't max out leverage on day 1. The Charter gives you starting capital — you don't need to lend all of it the first week.
• Watch CAR before NIM. Profitability doesn't help if the regulator seizes you.
• Counter-offers are free information. If a borrower accepts your counter, you've learned where the market is. If they walk, you've learned the same.
• Read the Quarterly Report. It surfaces things the Dashboard top-bar doesn't — concentration risk, loan-mix drift, division performance.
• Save before unlocking a division. Some plays don't reverse cleanly.