Our history in Switzerland

Banque de l’Indochine, one of Indosuez group’s original parent companies, was founded in 1875 by the son of Swiss bankers, Edouard Hentsch, who became the bank’s first Chairman.

Our other Swiss ancestor originated in 1876, when the fledgling Crédit Lyonnais opened its first branch in Geneva.

More than a century later in 1996, the bank would base the leadership of its international Private Banking network in Geneva, thus laying the foundations of our current platform.

In the meantime, the bank established solid positions in Wealth Management as well as in Transactional Commodity Finance and  and International Corporate Financing and Trading. These specialist businesses are still part of our activities in Switzerland.

Another of our origins can be traced back to 1948, the year that Bullion Exchange Trading, a company specialising in precious metals, was created in Switzerland. Many see this as the beginning of our our current expertise in this field. Our roots began to grow with the opening of Banque de l’Indochine branches in Lausanne in 1957, Geneva in 1979 and Zurich in 1983.

The development of activities in Switzerland gathered pace with the creation of Crédit Agricole Indosuez in 1996, in particular with the acquisition of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (Suisse) S.A. in 2001 and Intesa BCI Bank (Suisse) in 2003.

When Crédit Lyonnais joined the Crédit Agricole group in 2003, it became one of the top banking groups in Europe.

The merger of the two groups’ operations in Switzerland in 2005 gave rise to our Swiss office, one of the very first foreign banks in the country.

Today, we are writing the next chapter in our history as part of the Indosuez group, which brings together all of Crédit Agricole group’s Wealth Management activities.