Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China

From Freepedia

The Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China (or simply The Chartered Bank) was a bank founded in 1851/1853 following the grant of a Royal Charter from Queen Victoria. It opened its first branches in 1858 in Calcutta and Bombay and soon after in Shanghai.

The following year, it opened a branch in Hong Kong and an agency in Singapore. In 1861, the Singapore agency was upgraded to a branch. In 1862, the bank was authorised to issue bank notes in Hong Kong, a privilege it continued to excercise till the end of the 19th century. Over the following decades, it printed bank notes in China and Malaysia. The bank's expansion continued through the 1860s to the 1900s opening branches across Asia. In the early 1900s, the bank opened offices in New York and Hamburg becoming the first foreign bank to be issued a license to operate in New York.

The bank was greatly affected by the two World Wars. The bank's office in Yokohama, Japan was destroyed by an earthquake in 1923 killing a number of its staff.

In 1957, the bank acquired the Eastern Bank which gave it a network of branches in Aden, Bahrain, Beirut, Cyprus, Lebanon, Qatar and UAE.

It merged with the Standard Bank of South Africa in 1969, and the combined bank became the Standard Chartered Bank.

References

• Feng, Bangyan; (1861). A Century of Hong Kong Financial Development. Joint Publishing Hong Kong. ISBN 962-04-2129-9.
• History of Standard Chartered Bank on its website