Xinja is not a full reserve bank - as far as we know there are no full reserve banks either in Australia or anywhere (please let us know if you know of one!). 🙋‍♀️

That's because if a bank doesn't lend money out, it can't pay its customers any interest on what they've deposited (and if they were 'full reserve' they'd have to be able to immediately provide 100% of its customers with all their deposits at once would mean that they couldn't lend any money out). 💸

For example, if you put a 6-month term deposit with a bank, and they just leave it sitting in cash assets, they can't give you a cash return on that money. Plus of course, they can't make a profit by lending it out for more interest than they pay the depositor...that just leads to a bad bank with lots of fees and a high risk of running into financial trouble.💹

The way most banks think about this is that if EVERY customer wanted to withdraw ALL their money today, we need to be able to give X% of customers their money immediately, Y% of customers within 1 week, Z% within a month and so on. Xinja will be the same. Banks do need to adapt and look at alternative business models - like marketplaces (Xinja is very interested in this) and you might be interested in our CEO Eric's blog which looks at what a distributed network could do - 'the future of retail banking....assuming there is one'