The Banque Franco-Serbe (BFS, "French-Serbian Bank") was a French bank founded in 1910 to support French projects in the Kingdom of Serbia. It was a major financial institution in Serbia, then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and Kingdom of Yugoslavia until World War II.
The Banque Franco-Serbe was created in 1910 by a group of French-linked financial institutions, mainly the Imperial Ottoman Bank of Constantinople (known by its French acronym BIO), the Banque de l'Union parisienne (BUP) of Paris, and the Société financière d’Orient of Brussels, [2] the latter of which had been created by the BIO in 1896 to support markets for Ottoman securities in which it had troubled exposures. [3] The Paris-based Société Générale and Bardac family bank also participated. While the BFS's registered head office was in Paris, its general management was located at the branch in Belgrade from the start; it also soon opened an office in London. [1] At its creation, it was the only large commercial bank in Serbia, even though the state-run Uprava Fondova was larger, and played a central role in the foreign funding of Serbia's war effort during the Balkan Wars. [4] : vii, 2
In the wake of the Serbian territorial gains at the Treaty of Bucharest (1913), the BFS in 1914 took over the former BIO branches in Bitola and Skopje. During World War I, its activity in Serbia was suspended and its local gold reserves were shipped by the French Navy to Marseille via Thessaloniki. By 1925, it had additional branches in Fiume, Thessaloniki, and Zagreb, [1] and by 1930 also in Niš. [5] Following financial difficulties, the BIO, by then controlled by the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas (BPPB), became the BFS's majority owner through a capital restructuring in 1928. [1]
The BFS's Parisian head office was initially established in a building that had been acquired by the BUP in 1905 at 14, rue Le Peletier, [6] : 40 and moved in the early 1920s to a new building at 100, rue de la Victoire. [1]
By the late 1930s, the BFS was the only foreign-headquartered bank with large direct operations in Yugoslavia. It had branches in Bitola, Kosovska Mitrovica, Niš, and Skopje. [4] : 51 Following the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, its activities withered and it lost its significant business in Macedonia. [4] : 108-109 The operations of the BFS in Yugoslavia were nationalized by the Communist authorities by December 1946, together with all other banks in the country, [7] and merged into the National Bank of Yugoslavia. [8] The French entity kept existing until at least the 1970s as a subsidiary of the BPPB. [1]
The Banque de l'Indochine, originally Banque de l'Indo-Chine, was a bank created in 1875 in Paris to finance French colonial development in Asia. As a bank of issue in Indochina until 1952, with many features of a central bank, it played a major role in the financial history of French Indochina, French India, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, and Djibouti, as well as French-backed ventures in China and Siam. After World War II, it lost its issuance privilege but reinvented itself as an investment bank in France, and developed new ventures in other countries, such as Saudi Arabia and South Africa.
The Banque Belge pour l'Étranger was a Belgian bank that channeled many international banking operations of its controlling shareholder the Société Générale de Belgique (SGB) in the first half of the 20th century. It was originally established by the SGB in 1902 in Brussels as the Banque Sino-Belge, at the request of King Leopold II of Belgium.
Banque Indosuez was a French bank, the product of the 1975 merger of Banque de l'Indochine and Banque de Suez et de l'Union des mines. It was purchased by Crédit Agricole in 1996, and formed the core of what is now Crédit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank. As of 2022, its brand survives in Indosuez Wealth Management, the Crédit Agricole group's wealth management arm.
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The Ottoman Bank, known from 1863 to 1925 as the Imperial Ottoman Bank and correspondingly referred to by its French acronym BIO, was a bank that played a major role in the financial history of the Ottoman Empire. By the early 20th century, it was the dominant bank in the Ottoman Empire, and one of the largest in the world.
Baron David René James de Rothschild is a French banker and a member of the French branch of the Rothschild family. Since 2018, he is supervisory board chairman of Rothschild & Co and chairman of Rothschild Continuation Holdings, a Swiss holding company.
The Crédit Industriel et Commercial is a bank and financial services group in France, founded in 1859. It has been majority owned by Crédit Mutuel, one of the country's top five banking groups, since 1998, and fully owned since 2017.
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The Banque de l'Union Parisienne (BUP) was a French investment bank, created in 1904 and merged into Crédit du Nord in 1973.
Empain-Schneider was a Franco-Belgian industrial group formed in the 1960s from the merger of Belgium's Empain group and France's Schneider & Cie. In 1980 it was renamed Schneider SA. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the group was comprehensively restructured and sold most of its historic activities while acquiring operations linked to electrical equipment, leading up to its renaming in 1999 as Schneider Electric.
Henri Lafond was a French mining engineer and businessman who headed or sat on the board of numerous large companies and was involved in various industrial associations and committees both before and after World War II (1939–45). During the war he held a senior position in the Vichy government's Ministry of Industrial Production from 1940 to 1942. He was assassinated in March 1963 by an OAS member for refusing to support the movement to oppose Algerian independence.
The Banque de Salonique was a regional bank headquartered in Thessaloniki and Istanbul. Created in 1886 under the initial leadership of the Salonica Jewish Allatini family with Austrian, Hungarian and French banking partners, it contributed to the development of the Eastern Mediterranean and Southern Balkans during the late Ottoman Empire. In the Interwar period its activity was mainly focused on Northern Greece, where it operated until the German occupation, and Turkey, where it kept operating until 2001, albeit under different names after 1969. Its preserved headquarters buildings are landmarks, respectively, of Valaoritou Street, a significant thoroughfare of downtown Thessaloniki, and of Bankalar Caddesi in the Karaköy neighborhood of Istanbul.
The Banque de Madagascar, from 1946 the Banque de Madagascar et des Comores, was a bank established by the French government in 1925 to issue currency and provide credit in French Madagascar. As such, it fulfilled many of the functions of a central bank for the colony.
The Franco-Chinese Bank, in French Banque Franco-Chinoise (BFC), full name Banque Franco-Chinoise pour le Commerce et l’Industrie, was a French bank with operations in China and French Indochina, and later in the Indian Ocean and the French West Indies. In 1925 it succeeded the Société française de gérance de la Banque industrielle de Chine, an asset management company that had been formed in October 1922 following the closure of the Banque Industrielle de Chine.
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The Compagnie Algérienne, from 1942 to 1948 Compagnie Algérienne de Crédit et de Banque, was a significant French bank with operations in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon as well as mainland France. It was formed in 1877 in a restructuring of its predecessor entity, the Société Générale Algérienne, itself founded in 1865-68. The Compagnie Algérienne eventually merged in 1960 with the Banque de l'Union Parisienne. Following a series of subsequent restructurings, its main successor entities as of 2022 are the Crédit du Nord in France, the Crédit populaire d'Algérie in Algeria, the Banque de Tunisie in Tunisia, Attijariwafa Bank in Morocco, and the Banque Libano-Française in Lebanon.
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