The Commerzbank Aktiengesellschaft (typically referred to as Commerzbank AG or simply Commerzbank ) is a European banking institution headquartered in Frankfurt am Main, Hesse, Germany. It offers services to private, business and corporate customers. The Commerzbank Group also includes the Polish subsidiary mBank.
One of the oldest banks in Germany, Commerzbank plays a significant role in the country's economy. It is the largest financier of German foreign trade, with strong ties to the German Mittelstand. It also has a presence in all major economic and financial centers worldwide. Since its establishment in 1870, Commerzbank has undergone several changes. In 1971, it became was the first German banking institution to open a branch in New York City.
Another milestone was the acquisition of Dresdner Bank in 2009. During the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Republic of Germany became a major shareholder in the bank. The government remains a significant shareholder, though Commerzbank is listed on the DAX. In the 2020s, the bank returned to profitability, thanks in part to substantial cost reductions and changes to its business model.
History
1870–1918 Commerz- und Diskonto-Bank was founded on 26 February 1870 by , a merchant successful in South American trade, along with other trading houses and private bankers in Hamburg. The goal was to provide financial resources to Hamburg's trade and facilitate international commerce. The banking houses of Mendelssohn & Co., M. M. Warburg & Co., Hesse Newman, and B.H. Goldschmidt were among the founding investors. In 1873 the bank sponsored the creation of an affiliate in London, the London and Hanseatic Bank, of which it subscribed about half of the shares.
In 1881, Commerz- und Diskonto-Bank was among the founders of Nationalbank für Deutschland in Berlin, along with Anglo-Austrian Bank, Vienna's newly established Länderbank, the latter's affiliate Ungarische Landesbank, and Breslauer Disconto-Bank Friedenthal & Co. By 1891, it had become the largest bank in Hamburg by total lending. It participated in the rapid industrial and commercial development of the German Empire by providing trade finance, credit to small businesses, and investments in various industries that included shipping, electricity generation, mining, chemistry, and manufacturing. In 1897 it acquired Jacques Dreyfus & Co., a bank established 1868 as Dreyfus-Jeidels in Frankfurt, which also had a branch in Berlin. The bank shortened its name to Commerz- und Disconto-Bank in 1898.
In 1901 the bank joined the Reichsanleihe-Konsortium, a group of several dozen banks that placed loans for the German imperial government. In 1905 it acquired Berliner Bank (est. 1889 following the liquidation of the cooperative Berliner Handelsbank e.G., est. 1878) and from then until 1931 maintained two head offices: in Hamburg and Berlin, the latter at Behrensstrasse 46 / Charlottenstrasse 47. It acquired a number of regional and private banks, including B. Magnus (est. 1826 in Hanover) in 1897 and Altonaer Bank (Altona) in 1910.
During World War I, the London and Hanseatic Bank, the subsidiary established in 1873, was seized by the British authorities. Other German-owned banks were also seized. In 1917, Commerz began making acquisitions in Germany. By 1923 it had acquired 40 local banks.
1918–1933 In 1920 the bank acquired Mitteldeutsche Privat-Bank, a significant institution established 1856 in Magdeburg with a dense branch network in Saxony and Thuringia. The newly-enlarged group was renamed Commerz- und Privat-Bank AG. In 1923, it acquired 25% of Rigaer Internationale Bank in Riga, which was liquidated in 1933. In 1933, to cope with hyperinflation, it employed a total of 26,000 staff in 319 locations, the densest branch network among German banks; by the end of 1923, following the end of hyperinflation, the headcount fell to 10,200. In 1927, Commerzbank increased business in the US by establishing an office in New York City In 1928, co-founded General Mortgage and Credit Corporation, a long-term lender to small businesses, with Chase Securities Corp. and Halsey, Stuart & Co., . In 1929 it merged with the Mitteldeutsche Creditbank (established 1856 in Meiningen, relocated to Frankfurt in 1886), another transformative acquisition.
By 1930 Commerz- und Privatbank had deposits of 1.5 billion Reichsmarks and was Germany's fourth-largest joint-stock bank by total deposits, behind Deutsche Bank & Disconto-Gesellschaft (4.8 billion), Danat-Bank (2.4 billion), and Dresdner Bank (2.3 billion) and ahead of Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft (619 million) and Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft (412 million).
Following the European banking crisis of 1931 the bank consolidated all head office functions in Berlin, then in February 1932 it was prompted by the Reichsbank to absorb the distressed (established 1867 in Wuppertal, relocated to Düsseldorf in 1924). As a consequence, the government held 71 percent of the merged entity's capital, mainly through the Reichsbank subsidiary Deutsche Golddiskontbank. In November 1932 the Commerz- und Privatbank chief executive Friedrich Reinhart and chairman were among the signatories of the Industrielleneingabe petition of business leaders that advised President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Adolf Hitler as chancellor.
1933–1945 In 1935, Commerz- und Privat-Bank paid its first dividend in five years, and returned to private ownership in 1936–1937. In line with the Nazi policy of aryanization, the bank dismissed its Jewish staff, which by 1933 represented around 14 percent of its senior executives and 1.6 percent of employees overall. Supervisory board members and Albert Katzenellenbogen left in 1933 and 1937 respectively, as did management board member Ludwig Berliner in 1933. All three would be murdered in the early 1940s under the Final Solution policy. Commerzbank had no Jewish employees by 1938. By September 1939 it had 6,900 employees, of which 16 percent were conscripted into the Wehrmacht. In 1940, the bank formally adopted the name Commerzbank AG, the name by which it had generally been referred to for a long time.
Through the 1938 Anschluss, the annexation of the Sudetenland, and during World War II, the bank opened branches and subsidiaries in the expanded German-controlled territory and also benefited from the expropriation or sale under duress of Jewish-owned banks. (Conversely, it closed its office in New York in 1939.) In 1940 it opened a branch in Strasbourg. In 1941 it took over the former in Amsterdam and in 1942 renamed it the . In November 1941 it established Hansabank AG in Riga, with operations in Reval (December 1941) and Dorpat (December 1942), and in 1942, Hansabank NV / Banque Hanséatique SA in Brussels. In the former Yugoslavia, it took minority stakes of 6 and 10 percent respectively in Bankverein AG Belgrad and Bankverein für Kroatien AG in 1941, both carved out from the former Allgemeiner Jugoslawischer Bankverein which itself had been a product of dismantling Wiener Bankverein in the 1920s. In 1942 it also took a 10 percent stake in Böhmische Industriebank in Prague, and 10 percent in the newly established Deutsche Bank für Ostasien intended to develop trade with Imperial Japan. By late 1944, the bank's balance sheet size had tripled from its 1938 level, with two-thirds of the assets being German government debt. In comparative terms, however, it had been less expansionist and ideologically aligned than other large German banks, particularly Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank, and in 1942 fell from third to fourth place among German joint-stock banks. In early 1945, it relocated its head office from Berlin to Hamburg as a precautionary measure.
1945–1967
By the end of the war the former head office and close to half of the bank's branches were in the Soviet occupation zone, where they were promptly nationalized and liquidated. Of the 119 locations in West Germany, 42 were fully destroyed, 35 severely damaged, and 42 in working condition. In 1947–1948, these were first reorganized into nine groups of branches, intended to be operationally independent: Bankverein Westdeutschland (Düsseldorf), Hansa-Bank (Hamburg), Merkur-Bank (Hanover), and Holsten-Bank (Kiel) in the British occupation zone; Mittelrheinische Bank (Mainz) in the French zone; and Mitteldeutsche Creditbank (Frankfurt), Bankverein für Württemberg-Baden (Stuttgart), Bayerische Disconto-Bank (Nuremberg), and Bremer Handels-Bank (Bremen) in the American zone. In August 1949, the bank resterted operations in West Berlin, first as Bankhaus Holbeck, renamed Bankgesellschaft Berlin AG in October, and later Berliner Commerzbank AG. In order to expand credit provision to the German economy, the nine West German entities were consolidated by law in September 1952 into three: Bankverein Westdeutschland AG, renamed Commerzbank-Bankverein AG in 1956, in Düsseldorf; Commerz- und Disconto-Bank AG in Hamburg; and Commerz- und Credit-Bank AG in Frankfurt. On 1 July 1958, the Düsseldorf entity acquired the other two and changed its name back to Commerzbank AG. Berliner Commerzbank AG only merged into the parent Commerzbank on 1 October 1992.
In 1951 several of the groups of Commerzbank branches had taken stakes in , Germany's first investment fund management company founded in 1949 in Munich, thus establishing the basis for the group's asset management arm. By 1962, Commerzbank had surpassed its pre-war level with 372 branches. Meanwhile, the Commerzbank group restarted an international activity by opening a representative office in Rio de Janeiro in 1952, followed by Amsterdam and Madrid in 1953, Beirut in 1957, and Tokyo in 1961, the first German bank to open in postwar Japan. in 1967, Commerzbank established a representative office in New York City. That same year, it joined with Irving Trust, First National Bank of Chicago, Westminster Bank, and HSBC to form the International Commercial Bank in London. In 1969 Commerzbank opened a subsidiary in Luxembourg, Commerzbank International SA (CISAL), which for many years was its largest foreign subsidiary. In 1971 the New York office was converted into a branch, the first by a German bank in the postwar United States. Commerzbank opened further branches in London in 1973, in Paris in 1976, and in Hong Kong in 1979. It opened a representation in Beijing on 16 April 1982.
1970–1990
Commerzbank and Crédit Lyonnais entered a strategic partnership, the "Europartners Group", on 14 October 1970, in order to achieve cross-border synergies despite public policies which at the time prevented outright cross-border mergers. They immediately formed a 50–50 joint venture for U.S. securities business, Europartners Securities Corporation, which absorbed Crédit Lyonnais's New York investment banking operation. The Europartners alliance was joined on 11 January 1971 by Banco di Roma, adopted a common logo (the "quatre vents") in 1972, and expanded to Madrid-based Banco Hispano Americano (BHA) in October 1973. In 1974 Commerzbank and Crédit Lyonnais merged their operations in Saarland into a joint venture majority owned by Commerzbank and called Commerz-Credit-Bank AG Europartner, with seat in Saarbrücken and small minority stakes by the other two Europartner banks. In 1984 Commerzbank acquired a 10 percent stake in BHA, and BHA in turn took a 5 percent stake in Commerzbank in 1989. In 1988 Commerzbank acquired full ownership of Europartners Securities Corporation in New York from Crédit Lyonnais, and subsequently renamed it Commerzbank Capital Markets Corporation. The Europartners alliance was eventually brought to an end in 1992.