the world of private banking

PRIVAtE BANKS AND tHE ONSEt OF tHE CORpORAtE EcONOmy 51
dominated by the Deutsche Bank and the Disconto-Gesellschaft rather than by
Mendelssohn and Bleichröder, especially in the new areas of capital exports such
as Latin America, China and the Ottoman Empire; the more personal relations
of the private banking networks continued to play an important role in financial
transactions with the United States and Russia. Private bankers were usually offered
a share of the business and could occasionally take the lead, like Mendelssohn
in Russia. But for a typical Argentinean loan to be issued in London, Paris and
Berlin, Baring Brothers had as partners the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas and
the Disconto-Gesellschaft rather than a private bank.
In industrial finance, private bankers could no longer, by the 1880s, contemplate
an intervention on a scale comparable to that of the credit banks. They managed,
however, to retain a high degree of influence, visible through their presence on
the supervisory boards of the country’s major companies. In 1900, according to
a recent survey, half of the directorships of German leading industrial companies
were held by private bankers, as against 42.5 per cent for the directors of the ‘great
banks’ and 7.5 per cent for representatives of provincial banks. Private bankers
were still ahead, by one per cent, in 1913 and did not lose ground in any dramatic
way before the mid-1930s. They were able to offer a more personalized service,
highly valued by industrial companies, thus exploiting a niche and turning their
limited resources into an advantage. 31 In all European countries, an aristocracy of
private bankers survived until the First World War, though they did not necessarily
belong to the international haute banque. Such a membership depended either
on family links or on the global importance of the financial centre from which a
banker operated.
After London, Paris and Berlin, Brussels probably ranked fourth in the
European hierarchy and was the most international of the second tier financial
centres, mainly as a result of the strong presence of a cosmopolitan haute banque.
The Belgian haute banque reached its apogee in the third quarter of the nineteenth
century, with families such as the Bischoffsheim (a name tied to the Banque de
Belgique, founded in 1835, and the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas), Lambert
(the Rothschilds’ representative in Brussels), Oppenheim and their networks of
relationships both in Belgium and across Europe. 32 Like most of their counterparts
in continental Europe, Belgian private bankers lost ground to the universal banks,
in the first place the Société Générale de Belgique, 33 in the course of the nineteenth
century, though a few of them remained highly influential. The most successful
31
D. Ziegler and H. Wixforth, ‘The Niche in the Universal Banking System: the Role
and Significance of Private Bankers within German Industry, 1900–1933’, in Financial
History Review, vol. 1, 2, 1994, pp. 99–119.
32
See S. Tilman, Les grands banquiers belges (1830–1935): Portrait collectif d’une
élite (Bruxelles, 2006).
33
See G. Kurgan-van Hentenrynk, Gouverner la Générale de Belgique: Essai de
biographie collective (Bruxelles, 1996); H. Van der Wee (ed.), The Generale Bank 1822–
1897 (Tielt, 1997).