the world of private banking

PRIVAtE BANKERS AND ItALIAN INDUStRIALISAtION 201
To mention only the most outstanding cases, we go from the setting up of
Fiat in 1899 (which featured the Ceriana house among the founder members), to
the financial intervention in Montecatini on the part of Vonwiller and the Turin
bankers Kuster, Grasso and De Fernex in the early years of the twentieth century,
to the participation of the Manzi house in the foundation of the financing company
for the electrical sector of Siemens, the Società Nazionale per Industrie e Imprese
Elettriche in 1898, to the growing involvement of the Bondi bank in the Società
degli Alti Forni of Piombino, which progressively became the principal investment
of the family starting from 1905–06, to the financial connections between
Feltrinelli and Metallurgica Tempini and the Falck, to the financing of the Unione
Concimi by Jarach and Zaccaria Pisa. The presence in the cited cases of almost all
the sectors of the second industrial revolution confirms that certain ancient bonds
(with the silk sector and the textile sector in general) were by now only one of
the aspects – and certainly not the most important – of the new relations between
private banks and industry.
The insistent recurrence of certain names probably indicates that, towards the
end of the nineteenth century, a new process of functional ‘re-specialisation’ was
taking place among certain major private bankers after a very lengthy phase of despecialisation
that had led all the operators in the sector to deal with a huge variety
of activities (from banking in the strict sense to commercial activities and stock
trading). The term ‘private banker’ continued to comprise a vast variety of figures,
but the professional profile of certain of these began to be more in line with the
economic climate of the time.
This new functional specialisation does not appear to have been at the expense
of other factors and characteristics that had up to then distinguished the world of
the private bank: a relationship of personal trust, and the most absolute discretion
and confidentiality. Practices and relations of trust that had gradually developed
from the end of the 1880s, networks of friendship and personal connections,
explain the reasons at the basis of many of the relations which the private bankers
managed to set up with the industrial entrepreneurs. We can moreover plausibly
argue that, when the prime mover in a financial transaction was a mixed bank (as
was increasingly more the case from the mid 1890s on) it was in the interests of
the latter to aggregate the private bankers in certain operations, not so much or not
only to alleviate its own position, as much as to guarantee the complete success of
certain operations, such as the placement of a security, with the various urban élites
(rentiers, aristocrats, freelance professionals, etc.). Effectively, on account of their
status and habits, the latter groups had a greater ease and frequency of relation
with the private banker who, in a certain sense, was part of the same system of
social and cultural values professed by such milieux, and unquestionably more so
at the time than a high-ranking bank official. 67
67
A.M. Banti, Storia della borghesia italiana: L’età liberale (Rome, 1996); M.
Meriggi, Milano borghese: Circoli ed élites nell’Ottocento (Venice, 1992); P. Macry,
Ottocento: Famiglia, élites e patrimoni a Napoli (Turin, 1988).