: How many bank tiers are there? One can often see bank tiers 1-3 being mentioned, yet sometimes there are also tiers 4 to 6. So, how many bank tiers are there really?

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Here is a reference that seems to cover it, at least for Gartner: www.gartner.com/it-glossary/bank-tier

Bank tier or size — that is, the size of the bank in relation to other
banks — depends on the relative size to the overall banking market in
terms of total banking assets as provided by the balance sheet of the
bank. This type of comparison – across tiers – makes sense in relation
to a particular country or region that define that specific banking
marketplace. For this reason Gartner has preferred to adopt a
localized definition of bank tiers that depends on 11 different
regions that cluster together countries of similar economic and
business homogeneity and avoid a generic global definition of bank
tiers that would not allow proper comparison between the largest banks
of different regions.

Investopedia references bank tiers, www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/043015/what-difference-between-tier-1-capital-and-tier-2-capital.asp, but they are internal to the bank itself.

Under the Basel Accord, a bank's capital consists of tier 1 capital
and tier 2 capital, and the two types of capital are different. Tier 1
capital is a bank's core capital, whereas tier 2 capital is a bank's
supplementary capital. A bank's total capital is calculated by adding
its tier 1 and tier 2 capital together. Regulators use the capital
ratio to determine and rank a bank's capital adequacy