Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China (or simply The Chartered Bank) was a bank founded in 1851/1853 by James Wilson following the grant of a Royal Charter from Queen Victoria. It opened its first branches in 1858 in Calcutta and Bombay and then Shanghai.
The following year, it opened a branch in Hong Kong and an agency in Singapore. In 1861, the Singapore agency was upgraded to a branch. In 1862, the bank was authorised to issue bank notes in Hong Kong, a privilege it continues to exercise to this day. Over the following decades, it printed bank notes in China and Malaysia. The bank's expansion continued through the 1860s to the 1900s, leading it to open branches across Asia. The bank's traditional business was in cotton from Mumbai (Bombay), indigo and tea from Calcutta, rice in Burma, sugar from Java, tobacco from Sumatra, hemp in Manila and silk from Yokohama. It played a major role in the development of trade with the East which followed the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the extension of the telegraph to China in 1871.
In the early 1900s, the bank opened offices in New York and Hamburg. When it established its New York branch in 1912, Chartered Bank became the first foreign bank to be issued a license to operate in New York. The bank's office in Yokohama, Japan was destroyed by the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923, which killed a number of its staff.
In 1927 the bank acquired P&O Bank, which had offices in Colombo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Canton. P&O Bank also owned Allahabad Bank. Chartered Bank merged in P&O Bank, but continued to run Allahabad Bank separately until the Government of India nationalized Allahabad in 1969
The bank was greatly affected by the Second World War.
In 1957, the Chartered Bank acquired the Eastern Bank, giving it a network of branches in Aden, Bahrain, Beirut, Lebanon, Qatar and the UAE. It also bought the Ionian Bank’s Cyprus Branches.
Chartered Bank merged with the Standard Bank of South Africa in 1969, and the combined bank became the Standard Chartered Bank. Both companies were keen to capitalise on the huge expansion of trade and to earn the handsome profits to be made from financing the movement of goods from Europe to the East and to Africa.
[edit] References
- Feng, Bangyan; (1861). A Century of Hong Kong Financial Development. Joint Publishing Hong Kong. ISBN 962-04-2129-9.
- History of Standard Chartered Bank on its website
