Bank Account

Imagine it’s revealed that your staid, quiet grandparents were once wild and crazy. It’s the kind of startling revelation you want to have about grey-haired banks when you open Laurence B. Mussio’s Whom Fortune Favours, a two-volume hist­ory of the Bank of Montreal. Once omnipresent in business and society, Canadian banks were far more distinct from one another than they are today. The outsize characters who ruled them were revered or reviled by the public and comparable only to government in their influence. Now banks seem to be bland corporate citizens that deliver commoditized products with very little to differentiate them. Not even vast amounts of branding and marketing — with what look like images of the same happy families and smiling faces — can lend banks individual personalities.

Established in 1817, the Bank of Montreal was Canada’s first financial institution. All these years later, it’s the forty-seventh-largest bank in the world, having been...