A brief history of the US banking and payments system From the late 1700s through the mid-1800s, the development of the US banking system was dominated by roles played by individual states. Generally, commercial banks were not chartered by the federal government; rather, they were chartered, regulated, and supervised by the states and operated under different state legal and regulatory frameworks.
The explicit delegation of bank supervision to the states reflected the strong preference for decentralized authority and resulted in the first brief efforts to establish a national bank. In 1791, the federal government chartered the First Bank of the United States with a twenty-year charter, its first attempt to establish a central bank.