In this aspect the future development of banking opens a broad field to the constructive and ingenious man. It calls for the working out and application of well-tried principles in an immense variety of fields. It should be added, however, that as time goes on and as banking accommodation becomes better and better recognized as a necessity, there is a tendency for larger enterprises to develop their own special organizations to deal with it. Time was, as already often stated, when the business house depended almost entirely upon the advice of the banker. He was a guide and philosopher and too frequently a friend to the business man, expanding or contracting the credit of the latter as circumstances required. This function of all knowledge could be exercised only so long as the industry was in a very simple condition. It is out of the question to-day for the banker, however skilled he may be, to know very much about more than, at most, few branches of business. In the great banks a very high degree of specialization is attempted, and given officers are required to familiarize themselves with the problems of particular kinds of industry. As they become highly special in their knowledge they tend to drift into the branches of business with which they have become best acquainted, or the managers of those branches of business tend to associate with themselves ex-bankers or financial officers familiar with banking whose function it is to look after their financial affairs. Thus in many cases the great business concern finds it worth while to develop a financial department of its own whose function is that of determining its borrowing policy, the form of its borrowings, conditions under which its credit is granted, its foreign-exchange commitments, and a variety of other matters. The importance of such financial departments of corporations is seen as the corporation itself increases in scope. In the case of some corporations it has even been thought well to develop its financial department actually as a bank or as something corresponding closely to a bank. This tendency would have gone farther, it is likely, had it not been for the complex relationships to either individuals or businesses which are assumed when a bank begins to take deposits. Therefore the corporation whose financial department has assumed an extensive and complex form finds it more expedient to organize a separate concern, which is sometimes a bank, but frequently a financing corporation charged with the duty of conducting certain operations, largely in the interests of the parent company which brought it into existence. But it will probably be increasingly true that every corporation will develop a financial branch or division whose duty it is to study credit and to manage the finances of the enterprise in the most economical manner. The effect of such development is undoubtedly that of relieving regular banks of onerous duties and responsibilities which they may not be particularly well qualified to perform, and thus of simplifying their relationship to industry. Just as many great enterprises develop self-insurance and no longer rely on insurance companies, so many other enterprises will undoubtedly develop self-banking and will rely on banks only to supply the broader and more general features of their needs. This does not diminish the importance and significance of banking, but, on the contrary, it enhances it. It suggests that whereas we may expect a very great increase in the number of banking offices and a very great diversification of the types of banking, we may also expect an individualization of banking, with the performance of banking functions by those corporations with a sufficient scope of business to warrant them in doing so. The assumption of these banking functions will, however, as already noted, be in most cases simply applicable to the immediate financial needs of the concern itself and will not result in the taking over of duties which involve the supply of credit to the public. But the development of these individualized banking functions opens a large field of activity to those who are well equipped and expert in financial matters and offers a great and important career entirely outside of the field of banking in the narrower sense of the term.