the world of private banking

202
THE WORLD OF PRIVAtE BANKING
Writing in 1921, Pietro Palumbo confirmed that the banker was ‘in a fairly
favourable position in relation to competition with the banks. Many operations
could be performed by him alone, and once he had managed to set up around himself
an environment of trust and esteem, the capitalists, merchants and industrialists
found it easier to apply to him than to a banking institute’. 68 This statement may
appear paradoxical, but it highlights a certain truth which the financial historian
has taken little account of. Only in much more recent times have a handful of
studies begun to consider as essential to the training of a banker that set of personal
and professional values that are functional to the consolidation of his business, 69
encouraging a different way of observing the world of the private bankers. Then
there is another element that provides indirect confirmation of the pregnancy of
such observations. The opening of a branch of a mixed bank in a city, which on
more than one occasion took place through the acquisition of the control and then
the takeover of a leading local banking house, should be interpreted not so much
and not only as the inevitable victory of the giant over the financial pygmy, but
rather as a tangible recognition – which was frequently also formalised through the
assignment of management positions – of the role of the private banker in paving
the way for the new, powerful bank entity. We can consider the case of Credito
Italiano (certainly not an isolated case, a more profound study would be certain
to bring out a string of other viable examples) which opened its Naples branch in
1905 after having taken over the Meuricroffe house, entrusting the management
to John Meuricroffe, the last descendant of the family of Swiss origins that had
founded the banking company towards the end of the eighteenth century. 70
On the other hand, if we take even a swift glimpse beyond the outbreak of the
First World War that marks the implicit temporal horizon of this contribution, we
can note elements that confirm the notion of the private banker’s enhanced capacity
to ‘intercept’ – or at least to be the first to do so – a certain type of demand, such as
that emerging from the more complex articulation of Italian society that was partly
coincidental and partly a direct consequence of the conflict and of the phenomena
of enrichment permitted by the particular conditions in which business was
performed. This possibly explains the substantial stability in the number of private
bankers in the decade 1913–24, but also the growth of the war years which brought
the figures for the seven major financial centres of the country back to the levels of
1896. As against this, precisely the greater complexity of the requirements of this
new clientele, and above all the combination of these with the greater restraints
and controls introduced by the political and monetary authorities in the 1920s
and 1930s, help to explain the literally vertical plunge that the private bankers
experienced in the years leading up to the new banking law, issued in 1936.
68
Palumbo, Banchieri privati, p. 14.
69
Maifreda, La costruzione di un rapporto fiduciario; Maifreda, Banchieri ebrei;
Garruccio, Otto Joel alla Banca Generale, pp. 159–99.
70
B. Gruber-Meuricroffe, Die Familie Meuricroffe in Neapel, s. l., 1970, pp. 29–32.