The Northern Crown Bank was the offspring of the 1908 merger of Winnipeg's Northern Bank (established in 1905) and the exclusively Ontario-based Crown Bank of Canada (1904). Winnipeg remained the new bank's home base as it was ideally situated to serve the Northern Bank's strong western agricultural business base and to capture new business opportunities resulting from the rapid settlement of Canada's West.
National status required eastward expansion but the Northern Crown failed to build any significant "eastern" commercial opportunities to counterbalance its predominant agricultural-based business.
The Northern Crown's inability to establish more than a meagre presence east of Lake Superior left it vulnerable to the cyclical patterns of Prairie agriculture. By 1916, the bank's management had failed to build a sufficient inner reserve fund and provision for bad debts sparked an unloading of the bank's shares at depressed prices. Royal Bank's 1918 purchase of the Northern Crown and its strategically located network of Prairie branches offered Royal Bank a strong network of branches in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
