14 Facts About Ottoman Bank

Ottoman Bank, known from 1863 to 1925 as the Imperial Ottoman Bank and correspondingly referred to by its French acronym BIO, was a bank that played a major role in the financial history of the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Bank became Turkish-owned when Garanti Bank purchased it from Paribas in 1996, and was eventually subsumed in 2001 into the Garanti Bank operations and corporate identity, in turn rebranded Garanti BBVA in 2019.

Ottoman Bank Empire had traditionally relied on credit from individual financiers known as sarraf, which included Muslims but Armenians, Greeks, and Jews, as well as traders of European descent.

The Ottoman Bank government opted for the latter, which it identified as better preserving the country's independence from western financiers in comparison with the assertive approaches of the Rothschilds and Pereires.

Ottoman Bank then sought an issuance privilege from the Ottoman government, but the latter temporized as he preferred a solution that would combine British and French stakeholders, mirroring the Crimean War coalition.

Related searches

That same day in London, the shareholders of the English-chartered Ottoman Bank voted to liquidate it in accordance with the November 1862 agreement, a process that was only finalized in June 1865.

In 1868, the Ottoman Bank faced its first serious competitor with the creation of, a rival institution sponsored by France's Societe Generale and several Galata bankers including the Tubini family but Christakis Zografos and Stefanos Zafiropoulo, who had been the BIO's partners in the SGEO venture.

The Credit General Ottoman Bank was a major underwriter of Ottoman Bank treasury bonds, but ceased to operate in 1899.

In 1896, the Ottoman Bank played a major role in the establishment of the Eregli coal mining company on the Black Sea shore.

But, with the exception of Cyprus, during this time, the British and French executives of the bank left their posts, and the Ottoman Government abolished the privilege of issuing banknotes.

Under the direction of the BPPB, the Ottoman Bank kept its dual British-French structure, but with a new organizational concept in which individual countries where the bank had operations were allocated to one or the other of the two committees.

Ottoman Bank was set up as an institution in which people from multiple nationalities would work, even though the nationality of its most senior executives was the matter of numerous negotiations over the years.

In 1856, the Ottoman Bank started with offices in London and Constantinople, and opened branches that same year in the two key ports of Smyrna and Beirut as well as in Galati in Moldavia.

Inside Turkey, most of the former Ottoman Bank branches have been maintained as branches of Garanti Bank following the 2001 merger.