The person who handles your money is named after the bench he once sat behind.
The word "banker" traces to the Italian banca, meaning bench or table.1 In the commercial cities of medieval Italy, money changers conducted their business at benches set up in public squares and marketplaces. The banchiere was the person who sat behind the bench.
Florence and Venice were early centers of this trade. The Medici family, who dominated Florentine banking from the fourteenth century, operated through a network of branches that functioned as partnerships, each with its own banca.2 The same root gave English the word "bank" itself, arriving via Old Italian and French in the late fifteenth century.
The Germanic ancestor of banca was bank, meaning shelf or bench, from Proto-Germanic *bankiz.3 The word traveled south into Italian, acquired its financial meaning, and returned north into English and French carrying that meaning with it.
The related word bankrupt followed a parallel path. When a money changer in Florence could not pay his debts, his bench was broken, banca rotta, and he was out of business.
Modern banking bears little resemblance to a man sitting behind a bench in a piazza. The profession has absorbed functions from lending and currency exchange to investment, insurance, and derivatives trading. The Bank of England, established in 1694, was among the first central banks.4 The Federal Reserve System was created in 1913.5
The benches are gone, but the word remains. A Swiss banker and a Florentine banchiere of the fifteenth century share a title that still points back to the same piece of furniture.