Credit Suisse's founder, Alfred Escher, was called, "the spiritual father of the railway law of 1852," for his work defeating the idea of a state-run railway system in Switzerland in favor of privatization. Escher founded Credit Suisse (originally called the Swiss Credit Institution, i.e., Schweizerische Kreditanstalt) in 1856 primarily to provide domestic funding to railway projects, avoiding French banks that wanted to exert influence over the railway system. Escher aimed to start the company with three million shares and instead sold 218 million shares in three days. The bank was modeled after Crédit Mobilier, a bank funding railway projects in France that was founded two years prior, except Credit Suisse had a more conservative lending policy focused on short-to-medium term loans. In its first year of operation, 25 percent of the bank's revenues was from the Swiss Northeastern Railway, which was being built by Escher's company, Nordostbahn.
Today, Credit Suisse Group is a Swiss…
UBS, through Swiss Bank Corporation, traces its history to 1854 when six private banking firms in Basel, Switzerlandpooled their resources to form the Bankverein, a consortium that acted as an underwriting syndicate for its member banks. In 1871, the Bankverein coordinated with the German Frankfurter Bankverein to form the Basler Bankverein, a joint-stock company replacing the original Bankverein consortium. After the new bank started with an initial commitment of CHF 30 million and CHF 6 million of share capital, it soon experienced growing pains when heavy losses in Germany caused it to suspend its dividend until 1879. Following the years 1885 and 1886, when the bank merged with the Zürcher Bankverein and acquired the Basler Depositenbank and the Schweizerische Unionbank, it changed its name to Schweizerischer Bankverein. The English name of the bank was originally Swiss Bankverein, but was changed to Swiss Bank Corporation (SBC) in 1917. The Union Bank of Switzerland emerged in 1912…
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