The Bank of Ireland is a commercial bank operation in Ireland and one of the traditional Irish banks. The Bank of Ireland does not issue banknotes in the Republic of Ireland. Section 60 of the Currency Act 1927 removed the right of Irish banks to issue banknotes, of a common design issued by all "Shareholder Banks" under the Act, were issued between 1929 and 1953.

The Bank has forged strong links with IT outsourcing companies since 2004 or earlier. On 1 November 2010 IBM won the $450M full scope outsource contract to manage BoI Group's Information Technology (IT) infrastructure services (e.g. mainframe, servers, desktops and print services) in a competitive bid against HP (the incumbent outsource provider).