Fundamentally, ‘money’ provides three important features:     a uniform unit of account (we can write our prices in it and compare one to another) a store of value (we can build up our savings in it and trust they will hold their value) a medium of exchange (we can make payments with money as the intermediary)  By the 1840s, after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, there was a steady increase of European settlement in New Zealand.
It was then that the first commercial bank in New Zealand, the Union Bank of Australia, was established and it issued the first bank notes in New Zealand out of a shed in Petone. 2 This section draws heavily from Reserve Bank of New Zealand (2018) “The Journey of Te Pūtea Matua:  Our Tāne Mahuta”.