Who Founded BNP Paribas?

Pébereau became chairman and chief executive of BNP in 1993 and steered its privatisation that October. In 1999, after Société Générale bid for Paribas, he launched BNP's competing offers for both banks. BNP failed to win Société Générale but took control of Paribas, and the merged BNP Paribas was completed in May 2000. Pébereau was chairman and CEO of the new group until 2003, when Baudouin Prot became CEO, and stayed on as chairman until 2011. He chaired the board when BNP Paribas completed its takeover of Fortis Bank in May 2009.

Bischoffsheim founded a private bank in Amsterdam in the early 1820s, opened Bischoffsheim, Goldschmidt & Cie in Paris in 1846 and in London in 1860, and in 1863 merged these houses into the Nederlandsche Credit- en Deposito Bank in Amsterdam. On 27 January 1872 that bank combined with the Banque de Paris, founded in 1869 by a group including Adrien Delahante, Edmond Joubert, Henri Cernuschi and Eugène Goüin, to form the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas. In its first year the new bank co-led, with Crédit Lyonnais, the syndicate that placed a third of the French government's loan to pay the Franco-Prussian War indemnity. Renamed Paribas in 1982, it became the investment-banking half of BNP Paribas in 2000.

After the 1847 economic crisis and the February Revolution of 1848 froze credit in Paris, the provisional government created discount banks by decree in March 1848. Pagnerre became the first director of the Comptoir national d'escompte de Paris, whose ~$24 million (20 million francs) of capital came in thirds from private subscribers, many of them booksellers and publishers, from the City of Paris and from the State. Hippolyte Biesta succeeded him the same year. The Comptoir became a private company in 1854, opened branches in Shanghai and Calcutta in 1860, and in 1966 merged with BNCI to form Banque Nationale de Paris, the BNP half of BNP Paribas.