Ottoman Bank

The Ottoman Bank, known from 1863 to 1925 as the Imperial Ottoman Bank and referred to by its French acronym BIO, was a bank that played a major role in the financial history of the Ottoman Empire, becoming by the early twentieth century the empire's dominant bank and one of the largest in the world. It was founded in 1856 as a British institution chartered in London, then reorganized in 1863 as a French-British venture headquartered in Constantinople on a principle of strict equality between British and French stakeholders, though French interests came to dominate it because of greater success attracting French savers. In its early years it was principally a lender to the Ottoman government holding a monopoly on banknote issuance, before pivoting in the 1890s toward commercial and investment banking; after World War I the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas took control and renamed it Ottoman Bank in 1925, its remaining public-interest privileges were phased out, its foreign operations were dismantled by 1975, and it became Turkish-owned when Garanti Bank purchased it in 1996 before being absorbed into Garanti's own operations in 2001.