Bank of New South Wales
The Bank of New South Wales was founded in Sydney in 1817 in the British penal colony of New South Wales , making it Australia's first bank . With the opening of its doors on April 8, 1817, active banking began .
history
Australia
In 1817 there were just 15,000 Europeans on the Australian continent, around 5,000 of them in Sydney . Over 1,100 British soldiers guarded law and order and made sure that no other colonial powers could appropriate the land. The infrastructure was still under construction, there was no money of its own, banking was out of the question and colonial money was scarce.
The initiator of the founding of the Bank of New South Wales in this situation was the then governor of the British colony , Lachlan Macquarie (1762-1824). Macquarie , who was governor of the penal colony from 1810 to 1821 , tried to develop the colony. He had buildings and infrastructure built for a civilized community and explored the extensive area for further settlements. In 1817 he gave the bank a license to set it up , guaranteeing it limited liability. However, since this right granted by him never had a legal basis and the bank ran into difficulties from 1826, the license was withdrawn again in 1828. The bank survived anyway and asserted itself against the emerging competition from 1828 ( Bank of Australia (1826-1843), Cornwall Bank (1828-1835)). The foreign exchange business was built up from the mid-1840s .
On November 14, 1850, the bank opened its first branch in Brisbane in what is now Queensland . But their greatest expansion took place in New South Wales and Victoria with the start of the Australian gold rush in 1851 . In 1852 a branch was opened in Melbourne and a year later a branch in London . By 1861, the beginning of the gold rush in Otago in New Zealand and the establishment of the bank's first branch in New Zealand, the Bank of New South Wales had already opened 37 branches and, together with the Union Bank of Australia , was allowed to join the nine existing banks designate the third largest bank in Australia.
1875 was the Bank of New South Wales with deposits of more than 4.8 million Australian pounds already the largest bank in New South Wales , but with more than 1.4 million pounds only the number four in Victoria . At the end of December 1900, the bank had risen by far to the largest bank in Australia with a share of 20.5% of all deposits in the country. At the beginning of the 20th century, the merger processes began among the countless banks that had emerged in the previous century.
The Bank of New South Wales took over the City Bank of Sydney in 1918 , the Western Australian Bank in 1927 and the Australian Bank of Commerce in 1932 . But by far the largest merger was made in 1982, when the Bank of New South Wales merged with the Commercial Bank of Australia . With the merger, the newly created bank gave itself the name Westpac Banking Corporation , Westpac standing for Western Pacific and emphasizing the claim to be a bank for the western Pacific region.
New Zealand
The right to open a bank branch in New Zealand was granted to the bank via the Bank of New South Wales Act 1861 by the then New Zealand Governor Thomas Gore Browne (1807-1887). This also included the right to print and issue private banknotes . The financial and economic boom caused by the New Zealand gold rush helped the Bank of New South Wales , but also the Bank of New Zealand and the Union Bank of Australia , to establish a well-developed branch network. Like the other two banks, it was represented in all important places in the country.
In 1893 all banks were obliged by the Bank Note Issue Act to secure their money with the equivalent in gold and to invest gold reserves . With the establishment of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand on August 1, 1934, the Bank of New South Wales also lost its right to issue banknotes and had to sell its gold reserves to the central bank .
The Australian merger with Commercial Bank of Australia Limited was completed with their branch in New Zealand and completed a year later in March 1983.
On April 1, 1995, the Trust Bank in New Zealand was dissolved and in 1996 it was merged with the New Zealand branch of Westpac Bank to form Westpac Trust . A year later, the bank reverted to its old name Westpac New Zealand . In 2006, the bank and its holding company were renamed a stock corporation ( Limited ) through a new company formation .
literature
- Sydney James Butlin : Australia and New Zealand Bank . Longmans, Green and Co , London 1961 (English).
Individual evidence
- ^ Background to our beginnings . Westpac Banking Corporation , archived from the original on September 19, 2009 ; Retrieved on August 13, 2012 (English, original website no longer available, link to WaybackMachine from September 19, 2009).
- ^ A b c Sydney James Butlin : Australia and New Zealand Bank . Longmans, Green and Co Ltd. , London 1961 (English).
- ^ Bank of New South Wales . In: Cyclopedia Company Ltd (Ed.): The Cyclopedia of New Zealand . Volume I . Wellington 1897 ( online [accessed February 14, 2018]).
- ^ Pioneering spirit - the 1850's to 1860's . Westpac Banking Corporation , archived from the original on September 19, 2009 ; Retrieved on August 13, 2012 (English, original website no longer available, link to WaybackMachine from September 19, 2009).
- ^ How Westpac got its name . Westpac Banking Corporation , archived from the original on September 19, 2009 ; Retrieved on August 13, 2012 (English, original website no longer available, link to WaybackMachine from September 19, 2009).
- ^ The Bank-Note Issue Act 1893 . (PDF 2.6 MB) The Knowledge Basket - Legislation NZ , accessed on January 19, 2016 .
- ↑ NZ Economic Chronology 198 1. (PDF 172 kB) (No longer available online.) Reserve Bank of New Zealand , archived from the original on October 15, 2008 ; accessed on July 20, 2009 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Our History . Westpac Banking Corporation , accessed August 13, 2012 .
