Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas
French investment bank (1872-2000)
The Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas (French pronunciation: [bɑ̃k də paʁi e de pei ba], lit. 'Bank of Paris and the Netherlands'), generally referred to from 1982 as Paribas (French pronunciation: [paʁiba]), was a French investment bank based in Paris. In May 2000, it merged with the Banque Nationale de Paris to form BNP Paribas.
History
Background
In the early 1820s, Louis-Raphaël Bischoffsheim founded a private banking establishment in Amsterdam in his own name. His brother Jonathan-Raphaël created a branch in Antwerp in 1827 before settling in Brussels in 1836. Having married Henriette Goldschmidt, the daughter of Frankfurt banker Hayum-Salomon Goldschmidt, Louis-Raphaël Bischoffsheim established the Bischoffsheim, Goldschmidt & Cie bank in Paris in 1846, then in London in 1860. In 1863 he merged these banks into the Nederlandsche Credit- en Deposito Bank (NCDB, "Dutch Credit and Deposit Bank"; French: Banque de Crédit et de Dépôt des Pays-Bas), which he had founded in Amsterdam: the Bischoffsheim family thereby established a powerful multinational banking conglomerate.
Separately in 1869, a group of bankers and investors including Adrien Delahante, Edmond Joubert and Henri Cernuschi, with the private bankers Eugène Goüin (Tours), Adolphe-Ernest Fould of the Fould family, E. et A. Schnapper Stern (Paris), Brugmann (Brussels), Tietgen (Copenhagen), founded the Banque de Paris, with its headquarters near the Opera at 3 rue d'Antin, Paris.
Creation and initial growth
The two banks, Banque de Crédit et de Dépôt des Pays-Bas and Banque de Paris, merged on January 27, 1872, to form the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas.
During its first year of existence, the new bank joined forces with Crédit Lyonnais to head the financial consortium set up to float one-third of the Franco-Prussian War indemnity loan of 3 billion francs for the French government. The major part of the funds raised by Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas came through its Brussels outlet as a result of the close relations established with certain German financiers.
The public source identifies “Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas” as french investment bank (1872-2000). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Banque, Paris and Pays-Bas.
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This entry incorporates text from “Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.